• by Colin Kirkland , May 7, 2024

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into advertising, Meta is introducing new ways marketers can use generative AI (GAI) to focus less on “mundane tasks” and more on creative strategy. At a press event on Tuesday, the tech giant announced the rollout of full image and text generation.

For the first time, advertisers will be able to create full image variations based on their original ad creative with text overlay capabilities that generate new backgrounds around product images and alter images to better fit multiple surfaces.

To help explain the new tool, John Hegeman, Meta’s head of monetization, gave an example of a coffee bean business advertising a steaming cup of coffee. The business would be able to plug in its original coffee-cup creative and Meta’s image generator would create variations including different background scenery, adjustments to the cup, etc.

The diversification of images paired with the blend of original and AI-generated ad creative is what Hegeman and other Meta executives, including Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president of new monetization experiences, and Alvin Bowles, vice president of global business group, believe will be the key to unlocking the best results on its platform.

The goal of these updates, according to Hegeman, is to “better reflect brand guidelines with more customizations” while giving

While this feature has already begun rolling out, in the coming months Meta says advertisers will also be able to provide text prompts to help the program better tailor the creative image variations.

In addition, advertisers are now able to apply text overlays to images, with a dozen of the most popular fonts to choose from. Image expansion, which automatically fits creative to multiple surfaces, can now work with text overlays and is available on Reels and Feed across Instagram and Facebook.

As for text generation, Meta's text generator is able to create variations for ad headlines in addition to primary text. The company says it is currently training the AI tool to reflect brands’ specific tone and voice by highlighting key selling points based on their previous campaigns and text input.

Hegeman says this feature will eventually run on Meta's newest large language model, Llama 3, adding that “the update with Llama 3 is a pretty substantial difference.”

The company noted that political advertisers are not able to use these ads at this time.