With AI ad tools expanding, Meta courts agencies while reshaping their role

Even as the tools change, Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta’s head of global business group, aimed to quell any advertiser anxiety at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“Agencies are our critical partners here,” Mendelsohn said. She added, “How they see it as an acceleration of getting more insights for their creative will help them more with their advertisers.” The Meta exec spoke on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast recorded during the Cannes Lions festival.

Even as the language leads itself to agency partnership, the ad tools point toward a more automated ad system within Meta’s ecosystem.

The platform made a series of announcements at the festival, including expanded ad tools, a unified creator marketplace hub and AI-powered end-to-end creative solutions. With the updates, creative and media teams can share a new Meta software tool to understand what ads are performing and generate new ones. There’s also a “brand memory” feature that learns about a brand’s identity from existing ads and brings those insights into the creative generation capabilities within the tool, per Meta.

Meta also announced plans to collaborate with WPP to bring its revamped AI ad tool experience to WPP Open, the holdco’s agentic marketing platform.

Meta’s AI and automated ad tools bet seems to be paying off — even if marketers continue to gripe about Advantage+’s so-called black box nature. According to eMarketer, Meta is set to surpass Google in digital ad revenue for the first time ever this year. The social network is expected to rake in $243.46 billion by 2026 in comparison to Google’s projected $239.54 billion.

With those dollars in mind, Meta is currently prioritizing scaling agentic experiences for larger enterprise advertisers, Mendelsohn said. Meta also plans to continue investing heavily in their AI suite to iterate on existing tools and deliver even stronger returns on ad spend. (The exec did not share specific spend figures).