Meta is Rolling Out Generative AI Features for Advertisers

AI Sandbox is in limited release and will automate ad variant generation

Meta has produced a lot of innovative generative AI research (e.g., here, here, and here), but much of it has been introduced only to academic researchers. Earlier today, the company announced three generative AI features for advertisers.

• Text Variation: Generates multiple versions of text to highlight the important points of an advertiser’s copy, giving advertisers choice to try different messages for certain audiences.

• Background Generation: Creates background images from text inputs, allowing advertisers to try various backgrounds more quickly and diversify their creative assets.

• Image Outcropping: Adjusts creative assets to fit different aspect ratios across multiple surfaces, like Stories or Reels, allowing advertisers to spend less time and resources on repurposing creative assets.

Meta AI Sandbox

The solutions will be made available to advertisers through the new AI Sandbox. The sandbox will be a “testing playground for early versions of new tools and features, including generative AI-powered ad tools.” That suggests Meta is introducing a new process that can be employed for future AI tool launches.

Meta’s announcement indicated the program is currently avaialble to a limited number of advertisers as the capabilities are being tested and refined. The company expects to gradually expand generative AI feature access to other advertisers beginning in July.

AI, Advertising, and Hyper-creation

You may know that Synthedia’s generative AI thesis identifies hyper-creation as a core benefit of the technology. This is the capability to generate novel concepts and creative variants faster and in higher volume than employing human creative professionals alone.

Hyper-creation aligns closely with advertising needs as it can automate the rapid generation of many ad variants for comparative (i.e., A/B) testing. This is precisely how Meta expects advertisers to employ these technologies.

Today, advertisers on Facebook and Instagram often manually generate several variants of titles, description text, and images for each ad. Those variants are launched simultaneously, and Facebook’s ad algorithms evaluate ad performance and automatically shift impression volume to the best performing ads.

The promise of Meta’s generative AI features is that companies will be able to generate variants more quickly based on a single example. It will be interesting to see if the generated variants regularly outperform the original human-created options. This is the probable outcome. You should expect Meta’s models in AI Sandbox to be fine-tuned on known successful ad copy and images that drive higher click-through rates.

In addition, the outpainting feature will be welcomed by advertisers and designers everywhere. The need to create ad image variants for multiple aspect ratios is annoying and inefficient.