In a recent announcement, Meta revealed the advent of an AI Sandbox for marketers, aimed at facilitating the creation of alternative text variations, automated background generation, and adaptive image cropping for Facebook or Instagram promotions.
This innovative feature allows businesses to generate multiple versions of the same ad text, catering to diverse audiences while maintaining the principal message. The background generation function simplifies the process of creating varying assets for a campaign. Additionally, the image cropping tool assists organizations in designing visuals that can adapt to different aspect ratios, catering to different formats such as social posts, stories, or short videos like Reels.
Currently, these functionalities are accessible to a select group of advertisers, with plans to broaden the access to a wider range of advertisers come July.
“In our initial stages, we’re collaborating with a limited set of advertisers to swiftly accumulate feedback that will help us enhance these products. Starting from July, we aim to progressively extend access to a larger advertiser base, with an intent to incorporate some of these features into our products later this year,” Meta expressed in a recent blog post.
This development comes in the wake of a statement last month by Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, indicating the company’s interest in employing generative AI technology for advertising purposes.
Bosworth noted in an interview with Nikkei Asia, “[W]e’ll likely start witnessing some commercialization of this technology this year. We’ve just assembled a new team – the generative AI team – a few months ago; they’re fully engaged. It’s probably the area where I, along with Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox, spend most of our time.”
Meta’s Q1 2023 financial results were positive, surpassing analyst predictions and posting year-on-year revenue growth for the first time in three quarters. Despite the company’s focus on developing different AI tools, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized Meta’s continued commitment to metaverse development.
In the meantime, while Meta is introducing some basic generative AI features for advertisers, several ad tech startups are already heavily invested in this technology. Omneky, which presented at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt, used OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 to create ads. Additionally, Movio, backed by IDG, Sequoia Capital China, and Baidu Ventures, is utilizing generative AI to craft marketing videos.
