Meta’s AI push has made its way into ad creative. Not all marketers are happy about it

Something was off.

Last summer, the clothing brand Snag Tights began noticing some AI-generated tweaks to its Meta ad creative, Brie Read, brand CEO, told Marketing Brew. The brand addressed it in a Facebook post in February: “If you see an ad from us that looks ‘off’ or has that strange AI sheen, please know: It isn’t us.”

Turns out, Read told us, Meta’s AI ad tools had modified the brand’s ads without its knowledge, which Read said could pose more serious business implications.

“If the picture isn’t of anything real, you’re effectively scamming the customer, right?” Read said. “If I go to AI and go, ‘design me a rainbow handbag,’ and it makes me a picture of a rainbow handbag and then I upload it [to] Meta…To the actual customer who buys that handbag, that’s a scam, because [the product] never really existed.”

After the mishaps, Snag Tights requested that Meta turn off AI testing for its account, Read told us, and it did. But the experience spooked the brand enough that it’s looking to shift some ad spend off of the company’s platforms, Read said.

Snag Tights isn’t the only advertiser experiencing perhaps unanticipated challenges with Meta’s AI-powered ad tools. Amid Meta’s push to increase AI throughout the ad buying and creation process, some marketing agencies said they’ve noticed unwanted AI-generated elements or distortions in creative assets, while some advertisers’ budgets have automatically included AI ads testing, even if that wasn’t the intended use of the funds. In response, some advertisers are trying to shut off Meta AI—sometimes with mixed success.

Simone Levien, a Meta spokesperson, said in an email that advertisers have the ability to opt out of AI creative testing. “Advertisers can opt out of AI creative testing at any time directly in their Ad Account Settings,” she said. “We run these tests with a small share of ad impressions to help improve performance for businesses on our platform, but advertisers are always in control of their experience.” She declined to comment on the record about the specific examples shared throughout this story.

No easy task

Meta’s AI-powered alterations to ad creative is just one of many AI-powered updates rolling out across its platforms. That includes enhancing its ad retrieval system, Andromeda, as well as its Advantage+ AI tool offering, which along with AI-powered creative tweaks uses AI in the ad targeting and budget optimization processes. Meta is also integrating AI into its product discovery tools.

Like with some of its other AI features, it’s been a bumpy adjustment on the creative side. Curtis Howland, marketing VP at Misfit Marketing, said he has observed unexpected AI-powered modifications to ad creative, including changes to image size or background, as well as “full reimaginations,” including changing static content to video assets or to other, different static creative. “We turn that off whenever it pops up,” he said.

He described some tweaks that Meta AI made to an ad for an outdoor patio client in which it stretched an image to the point that it looked like grass was growing “on top of and into the patio,” he told us. “We turned that off quickly.”

Despite disabling AI features within its Meta account, the agency Formada Social has found that AI features turn back on, spawning new unwanted creative, Meghan Kelly, its co-founder and CEO, wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year.

“Even when we duplicate approved ads, AI features re-enable themselves, generate new visuals, and override decisions that were already made,” Kelly wrote in the post.

The agency, she wrote, continues to see some of its ad spend going toward what she described in the post as “Meta-generated creative” despite the agency going on “a wild goose chase” to disable AI features within its Meta account. Snag Tights said in its February post that some of the brand’s ad budget was used for testing Meta’s AI-generated ad content, which it did not want.

“We have opted out of every single AI feature we possibly can,” the company’s Facebook post read.

No thanks

Some advertisers said they have found it difficult to turn off the AI tools on the platform. Misfit turns off AI settings for clients, Howland said, but he added that it can be challenging to find the correct toggles within Meta accounts.

“The problem is that their AI ads are really bad,” he said, noting that even with other image generation tools, he “would never push an ad live without reviewing it.”

For that reason,“the idea of just letting Facebook in the background make a bunch of ads for you is absurd,” he said.

Other advertisers are taking additional steps. Snag Tights is exploring moving some of its ad spend off of Meta, and in the February Facebook post encouraged customers to let it know where else they spend their time online. So far, the brand is exploring ad buys and related engagement opportunities on Reddit, TikTok, Substack, and podcasts, Read said.

“If that kind of thing happens on Facebook a lot, where you get more and more ads [that] can’t be trusted by the customers, that’s also not a space we want to be in,” she said.