In the last few years, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has turned his business around to keep it relevant to our times. Lately, he has become the highest-profile technology executive to support and promote an open-source model for artificial intelligence. “This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great, that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can, so that way everyone can benefit,” he said in an Instagram video in January.

AI can play an important role in many of Meta’s verticals, like advertising. When we talk of artificial intelligence on, say, Instagram or Facebook, there are two sides to it — users and advertisers. Both are enjoying certain advantages with AI, which Arun Srinivas, director and head of ads business (India) at Meta, pointed out during a conversation with t2.

Meta recently unveiled a suite of generative AI tools designed to enhance the advertising experience on Facebook and Instagram, helping both the creative process as well as advertisers.

Meta launched enhanced Generative AI features, like full image and text generation. It is also bringing all of the features together in one place under Advantage+, its suite of AI-powered automation tools, supporting businesses along the entire ad creation journey. This will mean faster ad creation and more creative variations, which will ultimately save businesses time and improve the performance of their ads.

Arun Srinivas, director and head of ads business (India) at Meta

Meta has begun rolling out these updated generative AI features and aims to make them available globally by the end of the year.

Customisation is key

“AI has obviously been in vogue, if I can use that word, for the last year or so. For us, it’s always been there as the backbone of who we are and what we do,” said Arun.

For a long time, the company has been leveraging AI to make sure that, say, the Instagram feed each of us get is different from one another. “With advancements across the technology sector, investments have only increased both from Meta and across the whole industry and many new capabilities are coming. We largely leverage it to customise the feed and customise discovery in terms of what you ask for.

“For example, if you follow Bollywood and cricket, you want more content there versus something else, like from leisure, travel or food. I think now almost 20-30 per cent of our feed is recommended by AI. For example, if I follow a couple of cricketers — and not many of them — and if there is some interesting content, you may like these posts,” said Arun, who oversees all of Meta’s ads business in the country, including the company’s work with advertisers, large businesses, MSMEs, agencies, as well as key business partners. He and his teams drive Meta’s revenue growth across key business verticals in India and partner with the media and creative ecosystems for accelerating the adoption of digital tools by businesses.

With a more focused feed, it has led to increase in time spent on Instagram and Facebook and it has led to an increase in engagement as well. All this is on the user side.

Advantage Meta

The second part is how Meta is leveraging AI for advertisers. “We have a suite of products called Advantage+, which is helping advertisers get better return on their investment. For example, let’s say we have something called the Advantage+ Catalogue Ads where it may dynamically show you a different T-shirt than for me. Earlier, you would see a carousel with all the colours or the entire range. But now based on what you have liked, what you have shopped for in the past from a company… AI can come into play. We’ve seen increased sales. Then there is a product that targets ad-based companies to figure out who to target and what to target them with. And then there is Advantage+ Creative,” said Arun, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

He said that the company is putting “even more power in the hands of advertisers”. There are three tools to look at.
“One is Image Generation. So an ad manager can type in, say, ‘generate an image of me sipping tea in the background of a tea garden’. It will generate what I choose. Or simply generate a steaming hot cup of chai. That’s one way of generating creatives from text. The second one is Image Enhancement. This will help a lot of small businesses around the country. Usually there are expensive shoots, sizes and ratios. I can reshape the sizes to however I want it. The third one is Text Generation, which can generate innumerable captions as well as copy. If you want 100 words, you get that. For example, I can generate texts superimposed on the image, and so on,” said the Meta man.

Meta is bringing full image and text generation to its Advantage+ offering, enabling advertisers to create compelling and creative ads rapidly Picture: Meta

If creatives, for example, can be churned out at a faster rate, there will be better returns on investments. When producing text content, the algorithm can tackle the usual red flags, like hate speech, nudity or categories that are bad.

Keeping people engaged

Engagement continues to remain high: 3.24 billion people use at least one of Meta’s products each day, an increase of 7 per cent YOY. And a lot of this engagement is driven by Meta’s AI-powered recommendations system: 30 per cent of content posts on Facebook feed, on average, are delivered by Meta’s recommendation system. And that’s up 2x over the past two years. For the first time, more than 50 per cent of the content people see on Instagram is recommended by AI.