Mark Zuckerberg Declares War On The AI Advertising Industry!

JAKARTA - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly announced a radical vision that could potentially change the advertising industry as a whole. In an interview with Stratechery's Ben Thompson, Zuckerberg revealed that Meta is working to eliminate traditional roles in the advertising ecosystem from content creation to marketing strategies.

Zuckerberg explained that so far AI has helped improve ad targeting, but now Meta wants to revolutionize its creative side. According to him, companies only need to provide their marketing goals, connect bank accounts, and let Meta handle everything. This starts from creating images and video products, writing ad text, targeting audiences, measuring ad effectiveness, and doing iterations to increase the outcome. He called this approach a "definition of advertising categories."

Zuckerberg calls this concept an 'Infinite Creative', which allows Meta to create an unlimited number of ads for advertisers. With AI, Meta can compile various ad variants and automatically test which one is the most effective.

This approach will be very profitable for small businesses that do not have a large budget for advertising agencies or luxury marketing campaigns. However, this move also threatens the existence of the traditional advertising industry, including major brands and advertising agencies that have relied on an audit system for advertising data.

A number of advertising industry executives responded sharply to Zuckerberg's statement. An ad agency CEO said that brand security was still a major problem, so letting Meta create and optimize all aspects of advertising was a scary concept. What's more worrying is the measurement system that is fully controlled by Meta. "Klien won't believe the results they put out, because they're just checking their own work," said a media executive.

This model may benefit small businesses that have been dependent on digital advertising, but can make big advertising agencies rethink to channel their budgets to Meta.

Amid the increasing role of AI in the marketing industry, this change could be the beginning of a huge shift in the platform's economy. Is the world ready for an era where all ads are made, managed, and optimized by AI? Only time will tell.