Facebook parent Meta on May 8 unveiled new generative AI-based advertising features and bolstered its paid verification initiative to help businesses become more productive and expand their reach.
The social networking giant has introduced full-image and text generation capabilities for advertisers to help create ads faster and improve ad performance by developing different variations.
Businesses can now create full image variations inspired by the original ad creative with text overlay capabilities. This builds on earlier capabilities of generating new backgrounds around product images and expanding images to better fit multiple surfaces, which was first introduced in October 2023.
The image expansion feature, which allows businesses to adjust creative assets to fit different aspect ratios across multiple surfaces, will now be available on Reels and Feed across both Instagram and Facebook, the firm said. This effectively results in advertisers spending less time on creating ads for different formats.
For instance, a coffee business advertising a cup of coffee will be able to use this feature to create other variations of backgrounds, including those that embody a picturesque farm, and also provide adjustments to the coffee cup to offer more creative designs. In the coming months, advertisers will be able to describe their desired images through text prompts as well, Meta said.
Businesses will also have the ability to apply text overlay to AI-generated images, with an option to choose from a dozen of the most popular font typeface options.
Read: Meta to spend billions more on AI; CEO Mark Zuckerberg vows long-term gains
The new text generation capabilities will enable marketers to create variations for the ad headline in addition to the primary text. Meta said the firm is currently testing the ability for the generated text to reflect the brands’ voice and tone by highlighting the key selling points based on their previous campaigns and the text inputs that brands provide.
The company said these features will soon be built with Meta's latest large language model Llama 3, which will result in higher quality suggestions and improved ad performance.
Meta said it has started rolling out these generative AI features to advertisers, with a goal to make them available across the world by the end of the year.
These features will be available in the company's Ads Manager through the Advantage+ creative feature, which automatically optimises the images and videos to versions that the brand's audience is more likely to interact with.
"By bringing all of the generative AI features together in one place, businesses will be able to see the benefits of automation and generative AI at the same time" the company said.
New Meta Verified business tiers
Meta said it is also expanding a test of its paid verification programme, Meta Verified for businesses, by introducing new subscription tiers to better serve a wider range of business needs.
The company said it determines plan eligibility for each business profile based on a range of measures including the business activity on its apps and volume of interactions with consumers on its platform, including profile visits, post engagement, and number of message conversations among others.
Among the new tiers include - Business Plus ($45 per month), Business Premium ($120 per month), and Business Max ($350 per month). These tiers will be available in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the markets where the social networking giant started testing Meta for businesses last year.
These higher tiers offer features such as profile enhancements, being featured within the feed, limited support for external links in Reels, employee impersonation protection, and more ways to access support.
All subscribers will continue to have basic features such as verified badge, account support, and impersonation monitoring.
Meta said it is soon expanding the pilot to additional markets such as Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Peru, France and Italy. The firm also said that Meta Verified will be extended to businesses on WhatsApp soon.
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