Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industryZuck’s vision for infinite creative would wipe out the way the whole ad stack works.
Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the entire advertising industry
Zuck’s vision for infinite creative would wipe out the way the whole ad stack works.
It’s not really a secret that the advertising industry is about to get upended by AI — one reason big platform companies like Google and Meta have been so deeply invested in photo and video generation is because they know the first heavy users of those tools will be advertisers on their platforms. But no one’s ever really just come right out and said it — until today, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson and basically said his plan was to more or less eliminate the entire advertising ecosystem, from creative on down. Here’s the quote — Zuck was talking about how AI has already improved ad targeting, but now Meta is thinking about the ads themselves:
It’s not really a secret that the advertising industry is about to get upended by AI — one reason big platform companies like Google and Meta have been so deeply invested in photo and video generation is because they know the first heavy users of those tools will be advertisers on their platforms. But no one’s ever really just come right out and said it — until today, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson and basically said his plan was to more or less eliminate the entire advertising ecosystem, from creative on down. Here’s the quote — Zuck was talking about how AI has already improved ad targeting, but now Meta is thinking about the ads themselves:
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Zuckerberg: But there’s still the creative piece, which is basically businesses come to us and they have a sense of what their message is or what their video is or their image, and that’s pretty hard to produce and I think we’re pretty close.
And the more they produce, the better. Because then, you can test it, see what works. Well, what if you could just produce an infinite number?
Zuckerberg: Yeah, or we just make it for them. I mean, obviously, it’ll always be the case that they can come with a suggestion or here’s the creative that they want, especially if they really want to dial it in. But in general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.
What Mark is describing here is a vision where a client comes to Meta and says “I want customers for my product,” and Meta does everything else. It generates photos and videos of those products using AI, writes copy about those products with AI, assembles that into an infinite number of ads with AI, targets those ads to all the people on its platforms with AI, measures which ads perform best and iterates on them with AI, and then has those customers buy the actual products on its platforms using its systems.
I’ve been calling this swirl of ideas for AI-powered advertising “infinite creative,” and we’ve seen some interesting demos of it in the past, including at Nvidia keynotes. But I’ve never heard anyone pull the thread all the way to “connect us to your bank account and read the results we spit out,” which would basically wipe out the entire ad industry as we know it. It is fundamentally hostile to the world of big brands and big ad agencies, who have all built elaborate systems to audit the results platforms provide them after a decade of ad fraud and measurement scandals, and who have very strong opinions about what platforms like Meta can and cannot do well.
I sent Mark’s quote to some major players in the ad industry to get a reaction, and it was withering. “Brand safety is a big issue still, so letting them make and also optimize creative is a scary concept,” one agency CEO told me, but that wasn’t even their first concern. “The promise of his vision — ‘just read the results they spit out’ is the problem,” they said. “No clients will trust what they spit out as they are basically checking their own homework.”
Another media exec was equally scathing. “‘Read the results that we spit out’ is gold,” they said. “The full cycle towards their customers, from moderate condescension to active antagonism to ‘we’ll fucking kill you.’”
Now, Meta makes a lot of money selling ads to small businesses that can’t afford big agencies and fancy media campaigns, so these infinite creative AI tools might help them all out, and the big agencies might move their dollars elsewhere. But it’s also clear that the platform economy is about to change in seismic ways as these tensions rise, while the rest of us are forced to contend with a world full of AI-generated ads.
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