Credit: Marketing Dive

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NEW YORK — Meta Platforms is introducing new advertising products that use artificial intelligence (AI) to help marketers run campaigns more efficiently. The tools, detailed to reporters at Meta’s offices in Manhattan Thursday, show the Facebook and Instagram owner following its tech peers in investing more heavily in AI as the sector hits fresh peaks of hype driven by the popularity of software like ChatGPT.

While Meta has leveraged AI for years, its latest moves represent a push into the experimental category of generative AI that can quickly produce images and copy that are more convincingly lifelike. Key to this strategy is a new AI Sandbox tool that will initially offer three functions. Billed as a “testing playground” for generative AI, the feature lets advertisers create multiple variations of text copy and generate background images based on text inputs, along with automatically cropping images to best fit different Meta surfaces, like Stories or Reels.

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Executives acknowledged the popularity of rival generative AI products that have already been on the market for months but suggested that the sophistication and scale of Meta’s ad infrastructure could set it apart. AI Sandbox is being trained on Meta’s internal data, along with information from public sources and data that the company licenses.

“Where we see our unique opportunity is to tightly integrate these features over time into our products, which will allow advertisers to do a number of powerful things,” said John Hegeman, vice president of monetization at Meta, during the event.

AI Sandbox is currently being tried out by a “pretty small” number of advertisers, including the direct-to-consumer cosmetics brand Jones Road Beauty, which was present at the event. Starting in July, availability of AI Sandbox will be expanded.

“We are using it in our business to write copy, we’re using it to help with asset production and ideas,” said Jones Road Beauty CMO Cody Plofker of generative AI. “There’s still a long way to go with a lot of the tools, but I’m really excited about the potential ability to produce and create more creative in less time.”

Meta hopes to get buy-in from a diverse range of industry verticals for AI Sandbox, per Hegeman. The executive also indicated that the capabilities could eventually extend into more complex formats like video. Other aspects of the development roadmap seemed contingent on how advertisers respond to the tech.

“This will be a gradual process where we ramp up to more and more folks over time,” said Hegeman. “The exact timeframe will depend on some of the feedback that we’re getting as we continue to evolve and improve the capabilities.”