Meta announces generative AI features for advertisers

Meta today announced an AI Sandbox for advertisers to help them create alternative copies, background generation through text prompts and image cropping for Facebook or Instagram ads.

The first feature lets brands generate different variations of the same copy for different audiences while trying to keep the core message of the ad similar. The background generation feature makes it easier to create different assets for a campaign. Finally, the image cropping feature helps businesses create visuals in different aspect ratios for various mediums, such as social posts, stories, or short videos like Reels.

The company said that these features are available to select advertisers at the moment and it will expand access to more advertisers in July.

“Currently, we’re working with a small group of advertisers in order to quickly gather feedback that we can use to make these products even better. In July, we will begin gradually expanding access to more advertisers with plans to add some of these features into our products later this year,” it said in a blog post.

Meta’s announcement comes after the company’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said last month that the company was looking to use generative AI tech for ads.

“[I] expect we’ll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It’s probably the area that I’m spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox,” Bosworth told Nikkei Asia in an interview at the time.

Meta had positive quarterly results for Q1 2023. The company beat analyst expectations and posted year-on-year revenue growth for the first time in three quarters. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that, while the tech giant has started working on different AI tools, it remained committed to metaverse development.

While Meta is releasing some lightweight generative AI features for advertisers, some ad tech startups are heavily leaning into it. Omneky, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, used OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 to create ads. Movio, which counts IDG, Sequoia Capital China, and Baidu Ventures as its backers, is using generative AI to create marketing videos as well.