Meta Just Unveiled a Game-Changing Generative AI Tool Is the Stock About to Pop? The Motley Fool

TechCrunch states in another report that Meta also shares its plans to “create virtual worlds” through the power of generative artificial intelligence. In other words, Meta has the potential to grow the number of businesses advertising on its platforms. The company says it is working on new features that will allow businesses to use AI to connect with customers on Messenger and WhatsApp, driving engagement through conversational responses. Meta’s announcement comes after the company’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said last month that the company was looking to use generative AI tech for ads. During the call, Meta also highlighted that despite the $1 billion annual revenue rate, Reels are not generating enough money.

To aid in this, Meta is enhancing its partnership ads tool, so advertisers can easily integrate creator content with their ad collections on Reels and additional services. Another new way to create videos is by animating existing images, the company said. The new Image Animation feature lets advertisers animate a single, static image to create video-based ads for Instagram Reels. And with that, it’s also looking to help advertisers with the launch of a range of new ad formats specifically for video-based content. The announcements were made at the Advertising Week 2024 event in New York this week, where Meta revealed that the average user now spends more than 60% of their time on Facebook and Instagram watching videos, be they Reels, longer videos or livestreams.

How Meta is addressing marketers’ generative AI concerns with new tools

• After Apple implemented its App Tracking Transparency feature in 2021, Meta was affected badly.
• The generative AI gold rush is underway — just don’t expect it to create profits anytime soon.
• That’s a significant discount to its biggest competitors as well as smaller social media stocks.
• The AI boom also has buoyed other tech stocks like Nvidia (NVDA), which also has had its revenue lifted by the spike in demand for its components and software that are powerful enough to train and run AI technology.
• For example, Meta shared that the skincare brand Fresh saw a five-time incremental return on ads spend by running Advantage+ shopping campaigns with Shops ads and generative AI text variations.
• Valuable insights can be extracted from extensive historical data, facilitating the creation of fresh content such as written text, artwork, and software code.

Movio, which counts IDG, Sequoia Capital China, and Baidu Ventures as its backers, is using generative AI to create marketing videos as well. He said that the Meta AI assistant has been “tried” by “tens of millions of people” since it was made widely available last week, though that’s to be expected given how prominently it’s now featured in areas like the Instagram search box. The real test will be whether Meta AI becomes a product that people come back to often and if lots of people want to use an AI assistant in social media apps. Meta advertisers can already use generative AI to change the background of an image that they upload to the system, but Tuesday’s announcement expands those capabilities as part of the company’s broader push into the technology.

Meta also said that by the end of the year, it plans to roll out expanded text features like analyzing a company’s past advertising campaigns using the company’s latest Llama 3 large language model (LLM) to mimic a company’s previous advertising tone. The company said some of the generative AI features have been rolled out, with plans for them to be available around the world by the end of 2024. Two months ago, Meta CPO Chris Cox dedicated his time to coming up with AI tools that can help the company.

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Having just put its ChatGPT competitor in a bunch of places across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, much of the call focused on exactly how generative AI will become a money-making endeavor for Meta. As seen in the video below, the user’s original ad creative, an image of a cup of coffee with a pasture in the background, was transformed into a set of new images that showcase a cup of coffee in front of lush leaves. On Tuesday, Meta unveiled new generative AI features and upgrades that build on its current offerings to assist businesses in creating and editing new ad content, aiming to make the process quicker and more efficient.

A significant portion of Meta’s advertiser base is made up of small- and mid-sized brands that might find AI valuable since it lessens the need to produce what can be costly and resource-intensive marketing assets by hand. On the flip side, a greater reliance on automation has created headaches for some Meta advertisers and amplified concerns around transparency. Meta’s AI bets have also pushed it into new territory that carry implications for advertisers. The Information earlier this week reported that Meta is developing an AI-powered search engine to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft’s Bing. The company recently reorganized to create a top-level team for artificial intelligence. That includes consumer-facing products like Instagram lenses and business-facing products like its advertising platform.

Meta has big generative AI plans its advertising business, according to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.

Meta investors saw firsthand how reliance on any other company can suddenly produce a big negative impact on results after Apple rolled out App Tracking Transparency. Meta’s setting itself up to control its own destiny while producing a new wave of improvements and innovations in digital advertising that are sure to bolster its revenue. That makes it one of the best ways to invest in the continued shift in advertising spend toward digital.

As a final update, Meta said it’s making things simple for advertisers by consolidating its partnership ads tools into a single page within the Ads Manager, now called the Partnership Ads Hub. The main advantage is that it helps advertisers create more compelling ads with limited resources, the company said. In some cases, early adopters have had great success in repurposing previously successful, static ad images that had gone stale, by making them more dynamic and engaging. Meta AI is nearing 500 million monthly active users while advertiser-facing products like Image Generator are lifting conversions.

This approach puts Meta on a different path than OpenAI, which has, so far, resisted advertising as a business model in favor of subscriptions and a nascent enterprise focus. The company is already quite profitable, having grown net income to more than $12 billion on $36.5 billion in revenue in the last quarter alone. Zuckerberg said today that generative AI is “literally going to touch every single one of our products” and hinted at how the technology could specifically speed up WhatsApp’s nascent customer support business.

The company started testing these capabilities with a small group of advertisers earlier this year and hopes to complete the global rollout by next year. In the interview, Bosworth also addressed a recent backlash against the development of advanced AI technology. He called the demands expressed in an open letter for a pause on advanced AI development “unrealistic.” Advertising is the main source of revenue for Meta, which is looking to bounce back after a bumpy 2022 caused by competition with TikTok and expensive projects (cough, cough Zuck’s metaverse). The generative AI gold rush is underway — just don’t expect it to create profits anytime soon. Meta sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors today.