Meta Platforms:Advertising

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See also: Advertising Industry

1. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

It was launched in August 2022 and aims at simplifying the process of creating ads through the use of AI. "In just a few steps, an advertiser sets their business objective, target country, advertising creative, and budget. After that, they let our AI systems do the rest: optimizing to find the right person, with the right message, and at the right time to deliver a strong ROI. By leveraging AI and automation, it helps advertisers get smarter – faster – on which campaigns are driving results," Meta said.

A test done by Meta with 31 advertisers found that "on average Advantage+ shopping campaigns improved cost per acquisition (CPA) by 17% and return on ad spend (ROAS) by 32% compared to business-as-usual only campaigns."

It is believed that Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is significantly boosting Meta's ad business in a way that it enables it to recover lost ground due to Apple privacy change. Roberto Mendoza, associate director of global marketing agency iProspect, noted that " for every $1 spent on a website advertising campaign through Advantage+, clients were generating $7 in returns (nearly as high as before Apple’s privacy changes)." Similarly, David Herrmann, president of Herrmann Digital, estimates that his client has earned 20-30 per cent more revenue by using Advantage+ than other non-Advantage+ campaigns. However, despite the benefits, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns forces marketers to give up control of the campaigns.

It seems Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns is currently Meta's main priority as a senior executive notes that Meta has spend more money improving its AI capabilities than on Metaverse.

Product Updates

May 11, 2023: Meta announced an AI sandbox that will enable advertisers create alternative copies of Facebook and Instagram ads. The sandbox will also enable advertisers to create different backgrounds of images through text prompts. Additionally, it will crop images into correct sizes across Meta’s platforms. These features are only available to select few advertisers at the moment but will be expanded to other advertisers in July. The company also announced several Advantage+ updates and said that in the coming months they will begin introducing features that improve audience reach and promote dynamic video ads.

Commentaries

May 10, 2023: Meta's Global Business Group head Nicola Mendelsohn indicated that advertising market is seeing stabilization. "What I'm hearing is that there's a stability out there when it comes to how [digital advertisers] are seeing things now," She said. "So we've gone through a real period of real fluctuation, lots of changes that people couldn't have envisaged, but I think people are now more comfortable and confident in terms of what those uncertainties are, and they're factoring them in."

She reiterated that Reels is one of the fastest growing products. "[Reels is] one of our fastest growing products, and what we saw just in the last handful of months was a doubling of the amount of Reels being shared every day to 2 billion Reels being shared," she said. "That's people commenting and sharing and discussing and debating and really enjoying the content that they're seeing. A lot of that has been powered by the investments that we've been making in artificial intelligence and machine learning."

Mendelsohn also pointed messaging as a key ad opportunity. "We're seeing that one of the products that have that we call [Click to Message] actually enables advertisers to start a conversation in one of the individual threads," she said. "That now has a runway of $10 billion."

She said that Advantage+, which is AI powered is helping advertisers who want to reduce costs to reach the targeted customers.