How AI Is Upending Marketing

Increasingly sophisticated AI tools are enabling businesses to create photo and video ads without big budgets.

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights:

• AI is also about to transform the home-services industry.

• CDFIs may be the best-kept secret in small-business lending.

• Trump is doubling his tariffs on steel and aluminum (and betting big on coal).

• An AI CEO says the technology could spike unemployment to as much as 20 percent in less than five years.

MARKETING

Meta has plans to fully automate ad creation by the end of the year: “Using the ad tools Meta is developing, a brand could present an image of the product it wants to promote along with a budgetary goal, and AI would create the entire ad, including imagery, video, and text. The system would then decide which Instagram and Facebook users to target and offer suggestions on budget, people familiar with the matter said. Meta also plans to enable advertisers to personalize ads using AI, so that users see different versions of the same ad in real time, based on factors such as geolocation, the people said. A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain, whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street.”

• “Increasingly sophisticated AI tools are starting to enable businesses to create full photo and video ads without having to spend the money and hire production crews. Google released a new version of its video-generation tool called Veo at its annual developer conference last month that allows people to create short videos from a text prompt.”

• “Generating ads from scratch with AI could be a boon to small and midsize businesses, which represent most of the advertisers on Meta’s platforms and often lack big budgets for ad creation. Some big brands are wary of providing Meta even more control over their advertising efforts, given the company’s heft in the business, and worry that AI-generated campaigns won’t have the same look and feel as human-made ads.”

• “Newer AI companies are also racing to help advertisers create content. Many brands, for example, are already using third-party tools such as Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E to create the ads they place on all digital platforms, including Meta’s. Meta said it is exploring how to integrate those tools into its platform.” READ MORE

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