U of Digital Newsletter - 6/4/25 (free)

May 29th-June 3rd

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Zuck is skating to where the puck is going…

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Top Story 👁️

Meta Aims to Fully Automate Ad Creation Using AI🔒
Source: Wall Street Journal
June 2nd, 2025

Summary: Meta is pushing toward complete AI automation of advertising on its platforms by the end of 2026. In CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the future, businesses will simply provide a product image and budget, then Meta's AI will handle everything else—from creative generation, copywriting, and targeting to measurement and even real-time personalization based on user context.

Meta already has tools that let brands use AI to optimize creative and make different versions of ads, but the new capabilities would generate entirely new ads from scratch, including imagery, video, and text. They would also let brands hyper-personalize creative—such as showing snowy landscapes to users in cold climates while displaying a city backdrop for urban viewers.

Here's exactly what Zuck said to shareholders last week: “In the not-too-distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they’re trying to achieve, like selling something or getting a new customer, how much they’re willing to pay for each result, and connect their bank account and then we just do the rest for them.”

Just "connect their bank account" — that's Zuckerberg’s dream, right? But not all advertisers are onboard, and some hesitate to give Meta even more control of their budgets, especially with its track record of insidiously grading its own homework. For smaller advertisers, however, these tools may help affordably create professional-looking ad campaigns and grow efficiently.

As Meta goes all-in on AI, the company is also looking to automate how it evaluates risks on its platforms. Meta will use AI to automate up to 90% of risk assessments performed on its platforms, including algorithm updates, content sharing, and safety features, rather than continue using human reviewers.

Opinion: Meta's AI automation push makes perfect sense—and everyone up in arms🔒 about Zuck "hating agencies" and "killing jobs" is being naive. AI automation is obviously where marketing is headed, and Meta controls 20%+ of the industry. Leading this charge is literally their job.

The near-term impact is obvious: AI will make advertising better. More precise targeting, personalized creative, real-time optimization, better measurement. That lifts all boats and raises the bar. Great!

But the long-term impact is more complicated. When Meta's AI generates thousands of "personalized" ad variants for millions of advertisers—all optimizing against the same signals and metrics—it paradoxically recreates what digital advertising was supposed to replace: homogenized mass marketing. Your apparel ads showing snow in Minnesota and beaches in Florida won't be eye-catching when every brand is able to execute the exact same playbook at scale. And in a way, this homogeneity will make advertising worse.

As AI-generated campaigns flood feeds, consumers will tune out. That's when human creativity becomes valuable again, not for executing basics but for creating authentic, unexpected marketing moments that an algorithm can’t replicate.

We don't know what that next generation of standout marketing looks like, but we're betting it won't come from letting Meta's AI "do the rest." The marketers who resist full automation and figure out where human insight still matters will write the playbook for what comes after this AI gold rush.

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That’s It For This Week 👋

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