• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 2, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, has a broad vision of what AI can do for his business.

And it's good news. Like money in a bank.

But how much can we project from this -- for other media like TV, not just digital-first media channels?

Here is what he told Stratechery recently. Stratechery is a subscription-based newsletter/podcast focused on technology and media: 

“We’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account [emphasis added], you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”

For many, the AI-connected media/advertising process can be identified more closely with those digital-first media channels like social media where brands already use key data to find a highly targeted intended audience.

Many believe all this can help legacy media like TV when all the pieces of modern media and advertising chores are put together.

AI “creative” -- at least when it comes to somewhat simplified video, graphic pieces, voiceovers, and other elements -- has been in operation for a while among brands and ad-tech platforms.

Zuckerberg wants to go deeper: “Basically businesses come to us and they have a sense of what their message is or what their video is or their image, and that’s pretty hard to produce and I think we're pretty close.”

So for legacy TV sellers this is something we can ponder going forward.

Currently there are some basic, generated AI creative TV advertising content popping up everywhere. Separately, AI-powered platforms can now analyze data, optimize targeting, and automate some of the buying process,

Right now, AI is not intended to replace human expertise entirely. The saying goes that AI looks to aid the work humans do

But consider even bigger ground breaking changes -- like the upfront buying process, perhaps several years from now:

What does that mean for all that historic and legendary, late-night person-to-person upfront deal-making work? More importantly, who is going to order all that pizza -- or in more recent years, gourmet foods -- to help veteran media buyers get through the night with the fuel they need?

More to the point: Will AI systems perhaps determine that a TV/CTV advertising upfront isn’t even really needed?

That is, except for one thing that might require some human interface. Zuckerberg says -- just give us your bank account.