Meta pushes toward fully automated advertising future

Meta is working towards a future where advertisers will no longer need to create ads themselves. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the company aims to launch fully automated advertising tools by 2026, allowing businesses to simply input their website link and let Meta’s AI handle everything, from visuals and text to who sees the ad and how the budget is spent.

Sources in the report by WSJ, said that businesses would only need to provide a product image and their budget goals. Meta’s AI would then generate the entire ad, decide which users to target across Instagram and Facebook, and even offer budgeting suggestions.

The platform is also developing ways to personalise ads in real time, showing different versions to different users based on their behaviour and preferences. While this might sound like a major shift, Meta has been gradually moving in this direction for some time.

Since 2023, it has introduced features like text variations and AI-generated ad backgrounds. In October, the company shared data suggesting its automated Advantage+ campaigns perform better than ads created by people. Meta has also scaled back manual targeting options, saying its AI now does a better job when not limited by human-defined categories.

In a recent interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the long-term goal is to make advertising on the platform as simple as possible. “You’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is... you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic... I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising,” he said.

The 2026 target won’t mark the end of human-created ads, but it does signal Meta’s ambition to rely on AI for the bulk of ad production and placement.

 

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