Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, continues to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to optimize its advertising system. Today, the company unveiled its AI Sandbox for advertisers and detailed new features being added to its Meta Advantage suite of ad automation tools.
Since the inception of News Feed in 2006, machine learning and AI have been instrumental in driving Meta’s apps and services, including its ad system. The AI Sandbox, Meta’s latest initiative, is designed as a testing ground for nascent tools and features, including generative AI-driven ad tools.
The primary objective of the AI Sandbox is to identify what works for advertisers and integrate these features seamlessly into their ad tools. Initial offerings include text variation, background generation, and image outcropping tools.
Text Variation generates multiple versions of an ad’s text to underscore the salient points of an advertiser’s copy. This tool provides advertisers the flexibility to tailor different messages for specific audiences. Background Generation creates diverse background images based on text inputs, allowing advertisers to experiment with various backgrounds and diversify their creative assets swiftly. Image Outcropping adjusts creative assets to fit different aspect ratios across various surfaces, such as Stories or Reels, enabling advertisers to repurpose creative assets more efficiently.
Meta is currently piloting these tools with a select group of advertisers, gathering feedback to refine the products. The company plans to gradually extend access to more advertisers from July and integrate some of these features into its products later this year.
Meta Advantage, Meta’s portfolio of automation products, leverages AI and machine learning to optimize campaign results, personalize ads, and save time and money for advertisers. Meta has consolidated its automated products under this portfolio to aid businesses in identifying and benefitting from them. Meta Advantage is now set to receive an influx of new features to expedite AI utilization, offer more creative flexibility, and facilitate performance measurement.
Some notable features include the ability to switch manual campaigns to Advantage+ shopping in one click, and the inclusion of video creative in catalog ads. Performance Comparisons, a new automatic report feature, enables advertisers to compare manual sales campaigns to Advantage+ shopping campaigns to assess the impact of automation.
A major new product, Advantage+ audience, provides advertisers an updated way to reach potential customers and drive conversions. Instead of using hard constraints like demographics, Advantage+ audience uses advertisers’ audience inputs as suggestions to guide ad targeting. This flexible approach allows the ad system to reach people outside of these suggestions if they are likely to be interested and convert.
Meta continues to invest in its AI infrastructure and modeling, which underpin these enhancements. The company is now utilizing larger, more complex models in its ad system to improve performance and measurement even in the absence of granular data. These models optimize across all surfaces and objectives, improving advertiser conversions and the quality of ads users see.
Meta says this initiative exemplifies Meta’s commitment to using AI to enhance the performance of ads for businesses. With ongoing innovation, there’s a significant opportunity to improve experiences for both advertisers and users across all Meta’s apps.
