Retail Media

Meta leans on AI-driven ad tools to bring in the ad dollars this holiday season

The magic number is 20 diverse ad creatives to get the most out of Meta’s ad manager.
article cover

Meta

5 min read

Meta Founder Mark Zuckerberg swears by generative AI and its impact on how brands advertise on Facebook and Instagram.

And it seems generative AI is working for Meta’s ad unit. For Q2, Meta reported total revenue of $39.07 billion, and 98% of it ($38.3 billion) came from selling ads.

One of the products advertisers are spending money on is Meta’s AI-powered Advantage+ umbrella of tools. “Advertiser adoption of these tools continues to expand, and we’re adding new capabilities to make them even more useful,” Meta CFO Susan Li said on the Q2 earnings call.

This holiday season, Meta is once again making a pitch for its AI tools, citing use cases and ways brands can make ads faster and reach the right target audience.

For instance, Meta has launched promo codes in ads—including offers for first time buyers—so brands can highlight discounts to enable faster checkout. Meta has also tweaked its reminder ads to include seasonal sales.

This fall, Meta will also begin testing the ability for advertisers to show ads to users most likely to shop in-store and highlight nearby locations to them. All these features can be clubbed with Meta’s AI enabled Advantage+ shopping campaigns. The idea is to give advertisers more options for ad formats in their campaigns, Meta said, so they can implement a creative diversification strategy on the ad manager.

On the earnings call, Li noted that generative AI will “make it easier for advertisers to develop customized and diverse ad creative.” This creative diversification seems to be the secret sauce that enables advertisers to get better results on Meta’s ads manager.

Retail Brew sat down with Meta’s head of industry, Karin Tracy, who oversees retail, fashion, and luxury practices across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, to learn more about creative diversification and Meta’s ad strategy going into the holidays.

What are advertisers focused on for this holiday season?

Everything we’re hearing is holidays now—you are finalizing what’s going to work for you in September, and as of October, it’s go time…So, this is really what’s on everyone’s minds right now and it all goes back to how they are taking advantage of everything that we’re learning from our AI-based solutions, our Advantage+ suite of solutions.

Those who are really leaning in and understanding mix of business for things like Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, which is our fully end-to-end automated solution, are really understanding—okay, how much of my lower-funnel, conversion-based spend should I put toward end-to-end automation, and what does that look like for me specifically?

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

What we’re seeing as the greatest lever in terms of control you have in this end-to-end automation is all around creative. Creative actually has more of an impact on our auction, more than anything else. So, this is where you can be leaning in massively to understand things like creative diversification and making sure you are providing enough diversity of creative.

An emerging best practice we just came out [with] is that it should [have] at least 20 different versions of creative in order to see the best results. So, where we’re really leaning in with clients is to make sure that they have enough diversity in their creative and that our auction sees it as different that they’re leaning into every single placement—like Reels—to ensure that they’re taking advantage of the massive consumer behavior we’re seeing there.

Please talk about what goes into that creative bucket to make the automation work best.

We are asking you to give different versions of your creative that tell your story in different ways, with the end goal to have the system connect with audiences that that creative will appeal to.

How has Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns evolved since Meta introduced it in 2022?

The biggest piece of feedback we were getting from clients is that they wanted a bit more control. So, they didn’t want complete automation and just go find anyone and everyone that just converts, because that we know will get the best performance. But sometimes advertisers want to take advantage of automation and all that it has to value…but also what they value most. So, we have something called Conversion Value Rules that allow you to make sure that the auction is finding the customers you value most. So, maybe you just want Gen Z; we can now make sure that that customization is part of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to make sure that we are getting you to the performance that you want specifically, with some other customization in there.

In this role at Meta, is there anything about the business that still gives you sleepless nights?

The thing that I have been most focused on and obsessed with that keeps me up at night—in a more exciting way, than a scary way—is just the massive potential ahead of us with omnichannel, as we think about and test solutions for our ability to not only drive online sales, but also drive people to store.

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

R
B