Meta Platforms is accelerating its push into artificial intelligence by reimagining how ads are created and delivered. According to people familiar with the company’s plans, Meta is working toward enabling advertisers to fully generate ads from scratch using AI—text, visuals, videos, and targeting—by the end of 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Zuckerberg’s vision: Hands-free advertising
Advertising already fuels nearly all of Meta’s business, accounting for over 97% of its $131 billion in revenue in 2024. Now, CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees AI not only as a way to improve that core business, but as a path toward completely transforming it.
“In the not-too-distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they’re trying to achieve,” Zuckerberg said during Meta’s annual shareholder meeting. “We just do the rest for them.”
That future, according to sources, will see a small business upload a product photo, state a marketing goal and budget, and have Meta’s AI generate a complete ad campaign. The AI would then handle placement and targeting across Facebook and Instagram, adjusting for audience, location, and even the weather.
A game-changer for small businesses—but some big brands are hesitant
If successful, this could level the playing field for small and mid-sized businesses—the majority of Meta’s advertisers—who typically lack the budgets or creative resources to run large-scale campaigns. Meta’s AI would create variations of ads in real time, tailoring imagery and messaging to the user’s location or context. For instance, a car ad in a snowy region could show mountain roads, while the same car in a city would appear in an urban setting.
But for big brands, handing over full creative control to Meta’s AI raises concerns. Companies with strong brand identities fear that AI-generated ads may lack nuance and consistency. Some are also wary of giving Meta even more influence over their campaigns.
The race for AI ad supremacy
Meta isn’t alone. Google recently debuted a new version of its Veo video generation tool, which creates video ads from simple text prompts. Other AI players like OpenAI’s DALL·E and Midjourney are already used by brands to generate image-based content for campaigns, and Meta is exploring how to integrate such tools into its own platform.
Despite rapid progress, AI-generated ads are far from perfect. Marketers say that current tools often produce distorted or low-quality visuals that require manual editing to meet campaign standards. Building tailored AI models for individual brands also demands high computing power, adding to the technical complexity.
The new ad frontier: Budget in, results out
Zuckerberg calls it “a redefinition of the category of advertising”—one where businesses don’t need marketing departments or production crews. They just need a product, a goal, and a bank account.
It’s an ambitious bet on AI’s creative and strategic capabilities, and a clear signal that Meta is determined to lead the next era of digital advertising—even if it means disrupting its own business in the process.
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