Meta Unveils GenAI Tools for Business Advertising

Meta is rolling out a new way for advertisers to create marketing materials. 

Businesses can now use Meta’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create images for advertising campaigns, Meta said in a Tuesday (May 7) blog post. Business owners can feed the AI an image of their products and generate new backgrounds for it. The model also offers image expansion, which resizes the image to fit a range of sizes for different use cases, per the post.

Meta also plans to enable businesses to use text prompts to further customize their images, and said the feature would be available in the coming months.

The social media company is also introducing new text generation features, allowing businesses to create ad headlines as well as its main ad copy. Meta noted that it is testing ways for the AI to replicate businesses’ various tones and voices by highlighting key selling points based on past campaigns. This feature will be powered by Meta’s large language model Llama 3, and the company said it hopes to make ad text generation available worldwide by the end of the year.

The unveiling of these new AI tools for businesses comes weeks after Meta announced it would increase its funding to drive further AI innovation during its latest earnings call on April 24. The company said it aims to spend $5 billion more than it initially planned to develop new AI products for consumers, developers, businesses and hardware manufacturers, PYMNTS reported at the time.

Meta’s spending on AI and the metaverse-development division Reality Labs will range from $35 billion to $40 billion by the end of this year.

The announcement sent investors into a flurry, causing the company stock to fall 15%.

Meta’s focus on AI raises questions about the profitability of the technology.

“For now, there seems to be no end in sight to the arms race,” Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of generative AI company Aisera, told PYMNTS in an interview posted April 26.

“AI is clearly a top strategic focus. Think of it like the transition from on-prem to the cloud or from the desktop to mobile,” Sudhakar said. “These are massive secular trends that last many years. So, for a megatech company like Microsoft, Google, Meta or Amazon, missing out on AI would be disastrous. This is why they are pouring billions of dollars into capex.”