Season 6, Episode 18: Meta's Business AI and the ad-product divide

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Simon Whitcombe, the Vice President, Global Business Group at Meta. We discuss Meta's Business AI and the Meta AI business assistant, both of which were announced ahead of this year's AdWeek. I unpacked the potential of these tools to help advertisers cross the "ad-product divide" in Can Meta cross the ad-product divide?; in this episode, Simon and I deliberate on the non-advertising opportunity with platform AI tools like these.

Among other things, we cover:

• How Meta is bringing AI to bear for its advertising clients in non-advertising use cases;
• Other potential ways that Meta's AI tools can be used for optimizing advertisers' products or understanding of advertising performance;
• Meta's recent whitepaper on GEM, and whether Meta's attitude toward transparency with these types of systems has changed over time (especially in light of recent speculation about its Q3 update to Andromeda);
• How advertisers are using creative generation tools to expand creative diversity (versus merely increasing output volume);
• The tenor of feedback that Meta is getting from advertisers about Meta's AI business tools, and whether that feedback differs by company size, company category, geographic region, etc.;
• How the digital advertising landscape has evolved since COVID.

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