With generative artificial intelligence (AI) usage on the rise among advertisers, Meta has said that brand safety and the responsible use of the technology remains a key priority as the company scales up its offering with the aim of bringing Meta AI to “as many people as possible”.
Meta’s head of global business, Nicola Mendelsohn, said that even if something is created by generative AI, it still has to meet the rules and the regulations that Meta has on its platforms around community standards.
“Why would an advertiser want to create something that didn't apply to those standards?” she said
“We do have strict rules in that respect, and if anything, even if it was created and violated our standards, we would just take it down. It wouldn't matter if it was organic or if it was if it was an ad, it wouldn't have a place on our platform.”
The company’s CFO Susan Li told analysts towards the end of last year that Meta AI is seeing increases in usage of generative AI, including in Australia and New Zealand.
“We’re seeing strong retention with advertisers using our generative AI-powered image expansion, background generation and text generation tools, and they’re already driving improved performance for advertisers even at this early stage,” she said.
That uptick in usage, however, could open the doors to a clash between the need for creative freedom in ad campaigns with the demand for data-driven results – but Mendelsohn said that from her experiences pre-Meta working in creative agencies, she has always felt that the art and the science of advertising could exist as “very happy bedfellows”.
“Through the Gen AI tools that we have, it just gives the freedom to create so many more different ads than would really have been possible to have done in the past,” she said.
“What we see is that a greater number of creatives and stronger creative execution actually drives performance and does better in our auctions as a result, so we don't see these as either/or – we see these as very well connected and things that can absolutely drive performance and increase ROAS.”
Mendelsohn said that from a brand safety perspective – where recent conversations among advertisers have trended to the end of fact checking on Facebook and Instagram, something Meta itself said has had no “noticeable impact” on advertiser spend - the tech company still has all the same tools, controls and commitments that it has made previously available to advertisers.
“Whether to use generative AI is something advertisers decide themselves - what level of controls that they want to have, where they do or don't want to place their advertising - so we're going to continue to invest in this area, because we know that it's an important area for our advertisers,” she said.
Another hot topic among advertisers is a growing emphasis on privacy and data protection and how this will impact the future of digital marketing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Not only was the company caught up in the nationwide social media ban announced last year, but is likely to also be affected by any upcoming changes to the Privacy Act – and that doesn’t even begin to mention revelations from the Select Committee on Adopting AI hearing where Meta’s global privacy policy director admitted that not only has the platform been collecting data from public photos and posts from Facebook and Instagram and feeding it into its AI training models since 2007, but that Australians cannot opt out of the mass data collection.
Mendelsohn said that regulation is not something new to the tech giant - it's something that's been around for a long time and Meta takes its responsibility in the space “incredibly seriously”.
“We work hand in glove with governments and regulators all over the world and we hold true the importance of privacy and safety for the people that are coming to our platforms - we build it into our products from day one,” she said.
“I was in Davos a couple of weeks ago at the World Economic Forum, and this was a very hot conversation, and it was a conversation that was really being led by the European business leaders, who were actually voicing their frustration of the what they perceived was the over regulation in this space, especially around AI and technology.
“I actually feel that coming to the APAC region, there's a different feeling - that's not to say that regulation is not important here, it absolutely is, but it's balanced with the desire to innovate and the desire to be agile and to encourage businesses to embrace that which technology has to offer.”
Mendelsohn also confirmed that the Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses – launched last year in Australia and allowing users to take videos or pictures, make and receive calls, and listen to music and podcasts on the go, per the Sydney Morning Herald – don’t yet have any timeline for introducing advertising, saying it was still “very, very early”.
“I think it's a game changer in terms of how we see potentially the next computing platform actually emerging and developing,” she said.
“One of the things that we always concentrate on is making sure that we improve the user experience, and then ultimately, if there is monetisation, we'll think about that in the future.”
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