Google and Meta announce latest Ad & Platform updates featuring AI - The Daily Dose of Digital - 28/02/23

Another day, another announcement it seems from the big players in digital ad land, and this time it's a double hitter as both Google and Meta announced updates featuring the integration of AI into their platforms. Google has recently announced new tools to enhance search ads’ creative & performance with artificial intelligence and Meta now has a team dedicated to building tools powered by AI.

Google adds new AI tools:

For businesses to connect with their intended audience, monitoring changing trends in search and consumer behaviour is crucial, although one of the more time consuming elements, fraught with potential biases amongst other things.

To assist marketers in achieving greater results with search campaigns, Google Ads is making several changes to promote greater creativity and improved performance.

According to Google : "Search is changing, and our continued investments in AI-powered features like?multisearch ?are making the Search experience even more natural and visual. As consumer behaviour evolves with this shift, it’s more important than ever to ensure that people can connect with your business through Search ads that are both relevant and helpful. That’s why we’re introducing new tools that can help you unlock the power of your Search ads with stronger creative and better performance."

Create New Assets With Google’s AI

One of the most interesting new tools from Google Ads is the platform automatically creating ad assets using Google’s AI. This is a super-exciting development, although this might strike fear into many creatives & copywriters in the ad industry.

As most advertisers know, Google strives to ensure that the best ad is delivered to the right individual at the right time, which can be achieved with a wide range of relevant creative assets.

However, one of the key challenges advertisers and agencies can face is that it can be challenging to develop multiple/additional headlines and descriptions.

To tackle this issue, Google introduced automatically created assets at the Google Marketing Live event last year. This feature allows responsive search ads to display the most suitable asset combinations, which include new assets generated based on the ad’s unique context, such as the landing page.

Now, automatically created assets are available in English to all advertisers as an open beta. According to Google, early adopters have seen a 2% increase in conversions at a comparable cost per conversion among ad groups with responsive search ads.

Additionally, this update includes the following changes:

• Ad Strength will consider automatically created and existing assets when determining a rating.
• Automatically created assets will use inputs provided, such as keywords, to customize headlines and improve their relevance to the query.
• Any automatically created assets you’d prefer not to include in your ads can be removed.

There is always one fundamental worry about auto-generated or platform-generated dynamic ads - what if the copy is completely wrong / negative to the brand? This is going to require an exta-fine focus in the introductory phases to ensure the AI generated copy isn't incorrect, inaccurate to

Google also announces new Customer Acquisition Goal

In addition to the new AI generated ad creative, Google has also rolled out a new customer acquisition goal for Search campaigns globally, "enabling marketers to easily build a consistent pipeline of new customers through the use of Smart Bidding and first-party data".

Google explains : "Building a steady pipeline of new customers is key to helping you grow market share and drive revenue. To make this easier for you, we’ve rolled out a?new customer acquisition goal ?for Search campaigns globally. Powered by Smart Bidding and your first-party data, this goal makes it easy for you to optimize your campaigns and connect with new customers, helping you make the most of peak periods. When coupled with bidding strategies like Maximize conversion value with a target ROAS, the new customer acquisition goal can help you prioritize and find new customers who may be of higher value to your business".

The idea here is that by combining the new Customer Acquisition Goal with bidding strategies such as Maximise Conversion Value with a target ROAS, marketers will ultimately be prioritising the discovery of new customers who are more valuable to their business.

Google's new customer acquisition goal has the following two modes:

• Value New Customer: Bid higher for new customers than for existing customers.
• New Customers Only: Bid for new customers only.

Google Ads’ new features of automatically created assets and customer acquisition goals can benefit marketers by enhancing the relevance of their ads, connecting them with new customers, and ultimately boosting campaign performance.

These updates are set to be released in the upcoming weeks.

Meta announces expansion of their AI team

CEO Mark Zuckerberg?announced in a post on Monday that Meta now has a team dedicated to building tools powered by artificial intelligence, with the aim of eventually including “AI personas” designed to help people in “various ways” in addition to new AI tools across its apps and services. When we talk about personas, we have to assume there is a strong link to the ad audience challenges the Meta platform has been faced with since the increased blocking of pixels / cookies in recent years and the impending third-party cookiepocalypse.

Zuckerberg continues, more specifically announcing that the company is working on AI “experiences” with text, such as chat with Messenger and WhatsApp; experiences with images for things like “creative Instagram filters and ad formats” as well as “video and multi-modal experiences.”?

According to?Axios , the new AI team will be led by Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of AI and machine learning, who previously worked on Apple’s special product group.

“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” Zuckerberg writes. “We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll build along the way.”

The new Meta team will be focused on integrating AI, specifically with the combination of Generative AI + Creative Science across four key areas:

• Creatives will become as Scientific & Measurable as UA today
• Generative AI will enable UA managers to build their own ads
• Creative producers will have additional data-driven tools to build high-performing new concepts
• UGC will become commoditized with AI Personas

As OpenAI’s?ChatGPT surges in popularity , more companies, including?Microsoft ,?Google , and?now even Snapchat , are exploring opportunities in the generative AI space.

Meta recently also announced that it’s?working on an AI language generator of its own, called LLaMA , which is geared more toward researchers rather than the general public. It also launched two AI chatbots - Galactica ?and?Blenderbot ?— that weren’t exactly impressive, but it’ll still be interesting to see how Meta improves on and incorporates AI features within each of its apps.

What do you think about the integration of AI into the creative areas of digital advertising? Is this the start of the end for the ad copywriter? Or is this just a failsafe addition to support better user experiences where ad quality doesn't quite hit the mark? Let me know what you think in the comments.