Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

Summary

Marketers are finding out the hard way that Meta's AI tools can churn out some very strange ads.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that the company's artificial intelligence had become so advanced that advertisers would no longer need to create their own ads. Brands could simply hand over their bank accounts and campaign objectives and let the AI take the wheel.Some marketers, however, haven't been pleased with the results when they let Meta's AI drive their ad campaigns.Bryan Cano, head of marketing of the "elevated basics" clothing brand True Classic, was aghast when he noticed Meta had switched out his top-performing ad — an attractive millennial man in a matching fleece set, casually posing on a stool — with an AI-generated photo of a cheerful yet unnatural granny sitting in an armchair. True Classic typically targets its Meta ads to men ages 30 to 45.The AI Marketer reports on how artificial intelligence is disrupting advertising, brand, creative, data, and the role of the CMO. Contact Lara O'Reilly for pitches or questions.The ad ran on Meta for three days before customers alerted True Classic to it, Cano told Business Insider. He said that while the direction Meta is taking with AI makes sense, he felt the generative-ads tool wasn't yet ready for prime time. "This doesn't just affect our relationship with customers, who were upset by this, but it could also damage relationships with wholesale customers and the relationships we have built with retailers," Cano said.Tech companies, including Meta, Google, Amazon, and TikTok, have heralded AI as a way for advertisers to speed up ad creation and enhance the performance of their campaigns. However, many advertisers are wary of ceding too much control to black box systems, particularly since consumers often have an aversion to ads that are obviously generated by AI. The AI granny is a comical example of what can happen when algorithms go unchecked.True Classic isn't the only brand to have a chaotic Met...