Sebastien Bozon | AFP | Getty Images
Shortly after ChatGPT hit the market last yr and immediately captured headlines for its ability to look human in answering user queries, digital marketing veteran Shane Rasnak began experimenting.
As someone who had built a profession in creating online ad campaigns for clients, Rasnak saw how generative artificial intelligence could transform his industry. Whether it was coming up with headlines for Facebook ads or short blurbs of ad copy, Rasnak said, jobs that might have taken him half-hour to an hour at the moment are 15-minute projects.
And that is just the start.
Rasnak can be fidgeting with generative AI tools similar to Midjourney, which turns text-based prompts into images, as he tries to dream up compelling visuals to accompany Facebook ads. The software is especially handy for somebody and not using a graphic design background, Rasnak said, and can assist alongside popular graphic-editing tools from Canva and Adobe’s Photoshop.
While it’s all still brand recent, Rasnak said generative AI is “like the appearance of social media” by way of its impact on the digital ad industry. Facebook and Twitter made it possible for advertisers to focus on consumers based on their likes, friends and interests, and generative AI now gives them the power to create tailored messaging and visuals in constructing and polishing campaigns.
“When it comes to how we market our work, the output, the standard and the amount that they are in a position to put out, and the way personalized you may get because of this of that, that just completely changes every little thing,” Rasnak said.
Rasnak is removed from alone on the hype train.
Meta, Alphabet and Amazon, the leaders in internet marketing, are all betting generative AI will eventually be core to their businesses. They’ve each recently debuted products or announced plans to develop various tools to assist firms more easily create messages, images and even videos for his or her respective platforms.
Their products are mostly still in trial phases and, in some cases, have been criticized for being rushed to market, but ad experts told CNBC that, taken as an entire, generative AI represents the subsequent logical step in targeted internet marketing.
“That is going to have a seismic impact on digital promoting,” said Cristina Lawrence, executive vp of consumer and content experience at Razorfish, a digital marketing agency that is a part of the ad giant Publicis Groupe.
In May, Meta announced its AI Sandbox testing suite for firms to more easily use generative AI software to create background images and experiment with different promoting copy. The corporate also introduced updates to its Meta Advantage service, which uses machine learning to enhance the efficiency of ads running on its various social apps.
Meta has been pitching the Advantage suite as a way for firms to get well performance from their campaigns after Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update limited their ability to trace users across the web.
‘Personalization at scale’
As these recent offerings improve over time, a bicycle company, for instance, could theoretically goal Facebook users in Utah by showing AI-generated graphics of individuals cycling through desert canyons, while users in San Francisco might be shown cyclists cruising over the Golden Gate Bridge, ad experts predict. The text of the ad might be tailored based on the person’s age and interests.
“You may be using it for that kind of personalization at scale,” Lawrence said.
Meta’s Advantage service has been gaining traction with retailers using it for automated shopping ads, in keeping with data shared with CNBC by internet marketing firm Varos.
In May 2023, roughly 2,100 firms spent $47 million, or about 27.5% of their combined total monthly Meta promoting budgets on Advantage+, the Varos data showed. A month earlier, those firms directed 26.6% of their budget, or $44.9 million, to Advantage+.
Last August, when Meta formally debuted its Advantage+ automated shopping ads, firms put lower than 1% of their Meta ad spend into the offering.
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Georgetown University in Washington, Oct. 17, 2019.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
Varos CEO Yarden Shaked said the rise shows Facebook is having some success in persuading advertisers to depend on its automated ad technology. Nonetheless, Shaked said he’s “not sold on the creative piece yet,” regarding Meta’s nascent foray into providing generative AI tools for advertisers.
Similarly, Rasnak said Midjourney’s tool is not “quite there yet” with regards to producing realistic imagery that might be incorporated into a web-based ad, but is effective at generating “cartoony designs” that resonate with some smaller clients.
Jay Pattisall, an analyst at Forrester, said several major hurdles prevent generative AI from having a serious immediate impact on the net ad industry.
One is brand safety. Corporations are uncomfortable outsourcing campaigns to generative AI, which may generate visuals and phrases that reflect certain biases or are otherwise offensive and will be inaccurate.
Earlier this yr, Bloomberg News found that AI-created imagery from the favored Stable Diffusion tool produced visuals that reflected a variety of stereotypes, generating images of individuals with darker skin tones when fed prompts similar to “fast-food employee” or “social employee” and associating lighter skin tones with high-paying jobs.
There are also potential legal issues with regards to using generative AI powered by models trained on data that is “scraped from the web,” Pattisall said. Reddit, Twitter and Stack Overflow have said they’ll charge AI firms to be used of the mounds of knowledge on their platforms.
Scott McKelvey, a longtime marketing author and consultant, cited other limitations surrounding the standard of the output. Based on his limited experience with ChatGPT, the AI chatbot created by OpenAI, McKelvey said the technology fails to provide the form of long-form content that firms could find useful as promotional copy.
“It could actually provide fairly generic content, pulling from information that is already on the market,” McKelvey said. “But there is no distinctive voice or standpoint, and while some tools claim to find a way to learn your brand voice based in your prompts and your inputs, I have not seen that yet.”
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.
A spokesperson for Meta said in an email that the corporate has done extensive research to attempt to mitigate bias in its AI systems. Moreover, the corporate said it has brand-safety tools intended to present advertisers more control over where their ads appear online and it’s going to remove any AI-generated content that is in violation of its rules.
“We’re actively monitoring any recent trends in AI-generated content,” the e-mail said. “If the substance of the content, no matter its creation mechanism, violates our Community Standards or Ads Standards, we remove the content. We’re within the strategy of reviewing our public-facing policies to make sure that this standard is evident.”
The Meta spokesperson added that as recent chatbots and other automated tools come to market, “the industry will need to seek out ways to satisfy novel challenges for responsible deployment of AI in production” and “Meta intends to stay on the forefront of that work.”
Stacy Reed, an internet marketing and Facebook ads consultant, is currently incorporating generative AI into her day by day work. She’s using the software to give you variations of Facebook promoting headlines and short copy, and said it has been helpful in a world where it’s harder to trace users online.
Reed described generative AI as a great “start line,” but said firms and marketers still have to hone their very own brand messaging strategy and never depend on generic content. Generative AI doesn’t “think” like a human strategist when producing content and infrequently relies on a series of prompts to refine the text, she explained.
Thus, firms shouldn’t simply depend on the technology to do the massive picture considering of knowing what themes resonate with different audiences or easy methods to execute major campaigns across multiple platforms.
“I’m coping with large brands which might be struggling, because they have been so disconnected from the common customer that they are not speaking their language,” Reed said.
For now, major ad agencies and large firms are using generative AI mostly for pilot projects while waiting for the technology to develop, industry experts said.
Earlier this yr, Mint Mobile aired an ad featuring actor and co-owner Ryan Reynolds reading a script that he said was generated from ChatGPT. He asked this system to write down the ad in his voice and use a joke, a curse word and to let the audience know that the promotion remains to be going.
After reading the AI-created text, Reynolds said, “That’s mildly terrifying, but compelling.”
Watch: Social media showdown: Instagram to launch direct competitor to Twitter