AI Personalizes Marketing, Measurement, and Growth at Meta

Nick Primola:

Hi, I'm Nick Primola with the ANA. We're here at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando. And I'm here with Simon Whitcombe at Meta talking about AI and marketing and what's around the corner.

Simon Whitcombe:

Nick, thank you. Yeah, my name is Simon Whitcombe. I lead our global business group at Meta, which is essentially in North America, which is essentially the 500 largest partners that we have in the US and Canada. And thank you for having me.

Nick Primola:

So how is AI changing the way your company operates right now at Meta?

Simon Whitcombe:

It's changing everything. I would say our boss, Mark, is leaning in here. I think he's called this year the year of intensity as we focus on AI transformation across the entire business. As I think about the portion of the business I'm in I run a portion of our sales organization, we're really thinking about how can we use AI to become much more data-driven in our partnerships with our biggest clients.

Simon Whitcombe:

One of the ways that we're doing that is we're using AI to make a prediction or to make a data-driven prediction on exactly what we should be talking to our clients about next. And that prediction is based on a foundation of value-proofing. So we know the value, the products and solutions that we talk to our partners about drives and essentially we're using AI to essentially serve up that next thing our sales team should talk to an individual client about. It's a huge transformation and we're really excited about the direction it's going and yeah that's just one way that we're integrating AI into how we're working on a daily basis.

Nick Primola:

So in that whole journey what's been has there been something that's jumped out as maybe a surprise either way?

Simon Whitcombe:

One of biggest surprises we've had talking to clients about our AI solutions is been about how slowly some of our large partners are adapting some of these AI focused solutions. So we have four million of our partners today using our GenAI creative solutions. So that's a huge amount of advertisers. The lion's share of those partners are small businesses.

Simon Whitcombe:

Now, again, if you're a small mom and pop business and you've got access to these amazing GenAI tools you can see how they make your life better immediately. You can do things much quicker. It really democratizes the ability to produce ad creative and get it running on social platforms.

Simon Whitcombe:

I think for our larger partners, there's concern about protecting brand, about mistakes. So I think that journey is a slower one and definitely a more difficult one.

Nick Primola:

So in that journey, have you seen an action or decision that your customers are making that's going to be maybe more impactful and maybe more important than others and maybe for your own transformation journey at Meta, is there some decision that seems to be more important than others that's you accelerate or move forward?

Simon Whitcombe:

Yeah, I mean it helps when from a tops down perspective when the CEO or the CMO of your organization is like we are headed in this direction. I expect everybody to move in that direction. Certainly within my organization from the tops down there's an expectation that we understand and learn and actively use these tools in our day-to-day work.

Simon Whitcombe:

I think we're seeing with some of our large partners where that tops down demand or focus is beginning to pay dividends and other partners it's a much more cautious approach.

Nick Primola:

Yeah I love it. And maybe that's where to focus at that top down decision so you have that continuity in the organization. That's a great insight right there.

Simon Whitcombe:

Yeah, and again, I've always believed, I think there are a million reasons to say no until there's a compelling business reason to say yes. And again, I think that's a big part of the role I have at Meta. Working with our sales organizations is really framing the business opportunity here that AI unlocks rather than focusing on the AI itself. I think at the end of the day that is what is going to move partners in this direction.

Nick Primola:

It's so great to see that trend, right? Because as an industry, we've gotten just so easily distracted on technology and the things themselves. And I think this time around, the industry marketing has learned some good lessons from the past and just really focusing on how it creates that value.

Nick Primola:

And speaking of that, how are you, are you seeing it beyond the low hanging fruit, beyond the let's create faster horses. True value creation that you are seeing yet?

Simon Whitcombe:

We are in a very fortunate position. Nobody gets on Facebook or Instagram with the express intention of buying anything. But millions of people do every day because of our ability to make a machine learning driven prediction on exactly what ad message to show to you. Now that machine that we build, if you put a dollar into that machine, it spits out $3.82 almost immediately, which is an amazing machine when you think about that.

Simon Whitcombe:

But if you lean into our automation AI tools, so our Advantage Plus suite of products and specifically Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, that number jumps to $4.52. So you can actually see the impact of these tools are beginning to have in the return on ad spend that our partners are seeing on the platform. And again it feels like we're barely scratching the surface here there's much much more to come as we move forward.

Nick Primola:

That's what sounds like it's your point earlier about the most of the, the mass middle of the industry being small to maybe midsize business, but just what an advantage it gives them fairly immediately to just kind of get that scale. So that's great on the on the value side.

Nick Primola:

What about the lessons learned? I think lessons learned are as much value as anything else, especially as everyone's on their own journeys here. What are you seeing? jumping out.

Simon Whitcombe:

This is an interesting one. So we have this product that we launched a couple of weeks ago called Business AI. And we're incredibly excited about this product because it solves a whole bunch of problems that I think marketers have had for a long time.

Simon Whitcombe:

So Business AI is essentially a business agent that is trained for a specific brand that can live in three places. It could live inside of the ads in our apps and services. So inside of a brand's ads on Facebook or Instagram. It could live on their website as an agentic experience on the website. And it could also, if you click to a messaging thread on WhatsApp, it could be an agentic experience in messaging as well.

Simon Whitcombe:

And think of this as a white-glove service, because we know that when we serve somebody an ad, wherever it might be, oftentimes consumers have a lot of questions about that particular brand. And oftentimes those questions aren't easily answered even on the landing page when they click on an ad. So the Business AI experience allows you to ask a question of a Business AI about your brand.

Simon Whitcombe:

And I think one of the biggest learnings that we've had and I spoke to two CMOs recently who have been leveraging these tools is how simple some of these questions are that consumers are asking. And again I think that brands assume a level of understanding is much higher than the consumer's understanding always is.

Simon Whitcombe:

And these two CMOs were sharing with me that these are questions that they ask when they build their ad creative, where they're always, the consumers know the answer to this. But what they found from this Business AI tool is the basic questions are incredibly foundational and important. And now they're going to adjust their ad creative as a result of having that live feedback loop coming from AI.

Simon Whitcombe:

So I think that's just one of a million insights that we're going to learn over the coming months and years. I mean just really putting the marketer and frankly the company just closer to the real voice of the customer from so many different insightful perspectives. And again, that feedback loop wasn't available before.

Simon Whitcombe:

And again, I think one of the amazing things that AI is able to do is take incredibly complex data sets, which could be tens of millions of questions that are being asked of an AI, and then pattern match and find the themes that will impact how you build your ad creative, how you think about your customer experience, or even the products that you build moving forward. And again, I think we're just barely scratching the surface of this.

Nick Primola:

What's sort of bubbling up to the top in terms of how AI marketing is changing marketing more or less for the right now and into the year ahead?

Simon Whitcombe:

Frame this answer around operating our business. I've worked in digital media the lion's share of my career. I'd started building websites in the late 90s and anybody that's operated a digital business with advertising will tell you, in the history of the business, every time that you serve an ad there is a tax that you pay on engagement because in theory that ad is standing between you and the reason that you are leveraging that platform. It could be an article, it could be a video, it could be a story from one of your friends or family. And that's just been how these businesses have operated.

Simon Whitcombe:

We have a measure of that at Meta that we call ad school. Which really measures how well targeted an ad is and how welcome that ad is. I think the holy grail that we've all been working towards is that these ads become so personalized that it becomes as welcome as any organic content that you could be served from anyone.

Simon Whitcombe:

And I think that that is actually closer now today than it's ever been. And I think that within the next couple of years, we're going to be able to get to that point where we're going to be able to target and deliver a commercial message to a consumer that will be universally seen as great news on a consistent basis. And you think about the impact that that could have on the marketing industry as a whole, it's just an absolute game changer.

Nick Primola:

Yeah it is cascading in my mind right now, just the elimination of waste and maybe inefficiency, but the speed to insight seems to be amazing. Now, let me ask you sort of this two-part question here. One's probably an easy one as you are going through the journey at Meta, which is, what are the challenges or let's say a big challenge that you've seen with moving forward with AI evolution at Meta and then maybe it would be interesting to kind of hear how that may be different from your challenges in, you mentioned digital and website building in the past?

Simon Whitcombe:

I think that there are always more opportunities than there are compute. Because ultimately, these tools require a huge amount of compute and power to power them. So I think we are constantly making trade-offs in terms of where we are focusing our energy and sometimes those trade-offs can be quite difficult because there's so many opportunities. So yeah I think that would be one of the challenges that we're working through at Meta for sure.

Nick Primola:

Yeah, and I guess that's the important thing, you're working through it and then facing the next one because there's so much unprecedented here. So it's great to kind of see the forward momentum.

Nick Primola:

So what do you see as the long-term implication? Positive or maybe adverse implications of AI and marketing?

Simon Whitcombe:

Yeah, I think it's what we just, what we discussed already. I think it's getting to a level of personalization where that message is going to be incredibly welcome. I'll be the first to say I have an Instagram shopping habit and the amount of brands that I have discovered on Instagram, brands like Viori would be a great example or Away luggage that I would never have discovered anywhere.

Simon Whitcombe:

And again, I think that where we're going with AI and personalization, I think is going to just accelerate the amount of brands that could be introduced to consumers. I think that's one.

Simon Whitcombe:

I think the second one that I get really excited about is if you think about the digital era of marketing, I think one of the areas that hasn't really enjoyed the benefits versus others are really long consideration purchases. So if you're buying a car, if you're buying furniture or home goods these are very very considered purchases and it's very very difficult to follow that customer journey and really understand the impact of digital marketing.

Simon Whitcombe:

I think that's going to change with this AI era of marketing. I think with some of these business AI tools that I've been talking about, the ability to go beyond a click and a website visit to actually having a trained white glove concierge that will allow you to go down that funnel to the point of conversion is really going to open up digital marketing to a complete new category of partners where it will be transformative.

Nick Primola:

That's amazing for just companies and creativity and frankly our industry. We're already seeing so many areas where it just tightens up, where we may not be as structured as we need to be as an industry so this is also just great at every level.

Nick Primola:

Yeah. Is there anything you might want to cover otherwise? Advice for CMOs that you're hearing from CMOs or that you are seeing at Meta?

Simon Whitcombe:

I think the one last thing I would leave you with is measurement. Because measurement in this era has never been more difficult. And I think that what we're seeing in the industry, and certainly what we're really advocating, is this shift towards incrementality. Incrementality is the true test of the value of your marketing. What would happen if this person had not seen your marketing message? And how does that differ from the person who saw that marketing message? What is that incremental impact from the test and the control?

Simon Whitcombe:

Now we launched our conversion lift tool in 2015 and I was out there in the market talking to advertisers about incrementality and people were looking at me like I was nuts. It was not outside of very very sophisticated market segments, it was just not well understood.

Simon Whitcombe:

When in the last 90 days, 60% of the partners I work with in North America have conducted a single cell lift test. There is a shift in the industry towards incrementality and that is I think it is a welcome change. I think it's allowing people to pivot away from last click, which has been a long time coming. Let's be honest here, it's been a long time coming. I think it's helping people get to better outcomes. So it's like IROAS not ROAS. It's ICPA not CPA. I think that is great.

Nick Primola:

A little important shift right there.

Simon Whitcombe:

I think that is great news for the industry because again, if you're driving and you're focusing your marketing efforts on driving incremental impact the business is going to grow, right? And it's going to grow much faster than it would have if done otherwise. So we're really excited about this.

Nick Primola:

And if that conversation holds really where it's not just we do that once and then we do these other things and other metrics otherwise if the marketer is known as, when they walk in that door, that business stakeholders think, okay, we're going to talk about incremental growth. That's huge. So yeah, I love it.

Simon Whitcombe:

Yeah, and it's really, it's not only bringing the CMO along for the ride, it's really bringing the CFO along for the ride and really helping the CFO understand why causal impact is actually the number one way you should be thinking about these investments.

Nick Primola:

Is there a matter of, I guess, it's not a trust thing. I think it's more of just so much of what is coming out of Meta is just unprecedented and frankly, it seems too good to be true. Even when you actually test it out, it's like, how did that just happen? Right, it's never been, it's always just for decades, it's taken months to do this or it's taken so much more to do that. Are you seeing that sort of believability kind of start to shift as people get more actual learnings?

Simon Whitcombe:

Yeah, no, I think this is what you're explaining is real. And especially when advertisers or partners have been relying on last click for a couple of decades. It's like, well, hang on a second, how do we make this shift? And the inevitable question, are you grading your own homework here?

Simon Whitcombe:

So that's one of the things that we advocate for is we have our conversion lift tool but go and validate those results against third-party geo-lift. Just to go double-double check that what you're seeing in those results in our conversion lift tool are matching what you see from a geo-lift experiment.

Simon Whitcombe:

And again, I think there's any number of conversations I've had with large partners on this. When they do that I think they see that our actual conversion lift tools are quite conservative in comparison to some of the geo-lift signal that they get. But that's certainly something that we're encouraging partners to do to really validate results that are coming out of the platform.

Nick Primola:

Yeah. It's just so much to learn and I appreciate you're just kind of putting it out there and opening the kimono on your own journey.

Nick Primola:

I think you just sometimes you just overlook the fact that your experiences at Meta even are so valuable and your learnings that you're sharing are so valuable so thank you so much.

Simon Whitcombe:

Thank you, Nick, for having me and it's been great to be here. Appreciate it.

Nick Primola:

Thanks again. All right. Appreciate it.