Meta courts agencies with expanded ad tools while AI reshapes the industry
Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify
A shift is underway across the ad industry. Platforms are rolling out more automated marketing tools, lowering the barrier to entry for advertisers to manage campaigns directly. Agencies, long since tasked with managing those relationships, are on alert.
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).
More in Podcasts
Stagwell’s Curate launch puts agencies’ ad tech ambitions in focus
Agencies want more control over the pipes of programmatic advertising. Stagwell’s Curate is the latest example.
WTF is the IAB’s Redefining Media Types standard?
The IAB is trying to solve one of digital advertising’s biggest labeling problems.
As AI automates media work, Omnicom Media is rethinking the agency business model
AI won’t eliminate agencies, but it is forcing them to reinvent themselves. Omnicom Media Group is betting the future lies in strategy, data and capability, not scale alone.