Preparing for the first AI-powered holiday

As summer vacations fade and pumpkin spiced lattes arrive on menus, it’s time to finalize those holiday advertising plans. This year is gearing up to be a big one for digital marketers, as the first ever AI-powered holiday season. AI is taking center stage across the advertising industry with more tools available to marketers than ever before – from AI-powered automation tools to early-stage generative AI tools. To help make the most of the first AI-powered holiday, here are best practices, resources and tips so that you can get the most out of your campaigns.

A new AI Holiday Guide to help SMBs

To help more small and medium size businesses make the most of our AI-powered tools, we’re launching a new Holiday Guide featuring best practices and tactical guidance to maximize ad performance during this critical sales period. Whether you’re an e-commerce brand or a professional services entrepreneur, you’ll find tailored resources to take the guesswork out of your ad campaign. In addition, we’re launching a series of webinars later this month focused on SMB performance best practices, from automation and measurement to Reels and messaging. Learn more and download the guide here.

‘Tis the season for AI-powered automation tools

We have a portfolio of AI-powered products known as Meta Advantage, which can either automate one part of your advertising campaign or all of it. Nearly all our advertisers are already using at least one of the AI-driven products in the portfolio. To unlock your campaign performance this holiday season, use these features in the Advantage+ suite including:

• Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Find new customers with Advantage+ shopping campaigns by automating the targeting and delivery of ad campaigns, helping marketers find new customers. Brands like Jones Road Beauty are leaning into Advantage+ shopping campaigns and using the insights to fuel their creative strategy.
• Advantage+ creative standard enhancements. Up your creative game by using Advantage+ creative standard enhancements that use AI to help advertisers automatically apply small enhancements like adjusting brightness, aspect ratios and text placement to improve the performance of the ad creative.
• Advantage+ audience. Improve your results with the latest addition to the suite - Advantage+ audience, which automates the audience selection part of ad creation. On average, businesses that used Advantage+ audience saw a 28% decrease in average Cost per Click, Lead, or Landing Page View.¹

And beyond our Advantage tools, we leverage AI across our platform to help protect businesses, which is especially critical in peak holiday season. This includes our AI-powered brand suitability solutions that provide advertisers with control and transparency around the adjacency of their ad placements, along with other tools for businesses like Brand Rights Protection.

Unlocking new creative strategies with AI

Beyond the campaign performance gains, brands that use AI-powered tools can often unlock new customer segments that they might not have thought to target themselves. We’re seeing this trend more and more with advertisers using Advantage+ shopping campaigns. Now that marketers are finding new customers with AI-powered tools, they are learning that compelling ad creative is a new targeting strategy.

• For example, Bylt Basics, is a DTC menswear company and was one of our early testers of Advantage+ shopping campaigns last holiday season. They ran a bunch of different ad creatives through ASC and were surprised to see purchases from women over their Black Friday push. As a menswear brand they had only thought to target a traditional male buyer but ASC was able to find ad creative that performed well for a new female audience. Bylt took this insight and started creating more intentional ads to target a female buyer that may be buying gifts for their boyfriends, husbands and sons. This holiday, your brand’s competitive edge will be the ability to take insights from what’s working and use them to refine your strategy and create new ads throughout the season.
• Ogee, a luxury clean beauty company, recently tested Advantage+ shopping campaigns to drive traffic to their website and shops on Facebook and Instagram and saw a 45% improvement in cost per purchase and a 50% increase in ROAS. “Broad targeting with ASC has helped us uncover new customer segments we may not have originally thought to target,” said Alex Stark, co-founder, Ogee. “As a result, I work with our creative team to ensure our ad creative is reflective of the range of existing and potential customers our campaigns can reach to give the AI and machine learning behind ASC different creative options to work with. We’ve found ASC campaigns to be sustainable, so we shifted our focus to getting diverse creative to feed our campaigns.”

Tapping into generative AI this season

Generative AI is also making a splash this season, helping marketers develop ad creative faster than ever before. To help businesses take advantage of this opportunity we’re continuing to test generative AI features in our AI Sandbox with a small and diverse set of advertisers. These features include Image Outcropping, Background Generation and Text Variation. While these features are still in early testing, this season is about learning what generative AI tools advertisers and consumers find useful so we can shape these cases together to drive value, and maintain responsible practices. Today we see generative AI providing the most value to the feedback loop, helping marketers get an idea of what an ad could look like before investing in production.

As we inch closer to the holidays, we will continue to share best practices, new tools and what’s working for advertisers to make sure you are able to achieve your sales goals this season.