Meta is accelerating the full automation of its advertising business, planning to achieve the entire process from ad creation to delivery by AI systems by 2026. Advertisers will only need to provide their company website, and the rest will be handled by artificial intelligence. Internal information disclosed by The Wall Street Journal shows that Meta is building an "automation-only" advertising system—after advertisers input product images and budget targets, AI will generate complete advertising materials, including images, videos, and copy, and will be responsible for selecting the target audience on Facebook and Instagram, while also providing budget optimization suggestions.
This plan is based on Meta's continuously evolving AI models. In 2023, Meta has already launched features such as text variants, visual customization, and automatic delivery, and its Advantage+ series of ads have surpassed manually created ads in multiple metrics. Meta is also gradually reducing the detailed targeting features in its advertising system, believing that AI performs better without traditional "human constraints".
In March this year, Meta emphasized that various AI systems will work together to enhance advertising effectiveness. In an interview in June, Meta CEO Zuckerberg stated that in the future, companies will not need creative materials and audience settings, only clear goals and funding sources to run ads: "This will completely change the entire advertising industry."
Meta has already set a specific timetable for the full automation of advertising, although this does not mean that manual creativity will disappear, it is foreseeable that the role of advertising practitioners will undergo a fundamental change in the future. Understanding the logic and operation of AI tools, mastering optimization paths, and integrating AI-generated content into the overall brand strategy will become the new core competitiveness of advertisers.
Although AI systems have advantages in efficiency and effectiveness due to big data, the emotional dimension of creativity and the long-term value of brand building still need to be led by humans. Meta's automated advertising is not the end of the marketing industry, but a profound restructuring.
