Meta Platforms has announced new generative AI features developed for marketers that produce video advertisements. Announced as part of Meta’s Advantage+ ad suite, marketers can now use up to 20 product stills to create multi-scene video ads with music and text overlay. The company has also added generative AI voices and virtual try-ons to its Advantage+ marketer toolkit. The upgrades were announced at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where the topic of Meta using AI not only to create ads but to algorithmically serve them to target audiences was a topic of conversation.

“Meta has made AI a key focus of its advertising business, which accounts for roughly 98 percent of annual revenue,” writes Bloomberg, noting that “most of Meta’s advertisers are small businesses, and the cheaper it is for them to produce marketing material, the more money they have to spend promoting those messages on Facebook or Instagram.”

But Meta thinks large brands would also be interested in such tools, hence its push on the Croissette. The type of generative AI it was pitching would not only let marketers get ads in front of customers very quickly but require less manpower.

“Meta also plans to enable advertisers to personalize ads using AI, so that users see different versions of the same ad in real time, based on factors such as geolocation,” The Wall Street Journal wrote earlier this month.

“A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain, whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street,” WSJ said — an approach that could potentially enhance the time-honored tradition of cutting different ads for different demographic groups.

CNET reports Meta’s new ad tech could “potentially shake up the $600 billion global ad business” by allowing more businesses to participate in advertising. “All of a sudden, millions of individual creators who were intimidated by advertising can start small and grow,” CNET quotes UNC Chapel Hill Professor of Advertising Gary Kayye saying, adding that the automated ad business could “increase the amount of commerce globally.”

Meta isn’t the only company interested in AI-automated advertising. Jeffrey Katzenberg has invested in Creatify, a startup focused on generative social media ads. With its huge trove of user data, Meta does have an advantage when it comes to programmatics and audience targeting.

In addition to announcing “the next era generative AI for advertising” at the French advertising festival, Meta also said it will for the first time bring advertising to WhatsApp and has gone on a spending spree to recruit top AI practitioners to the company.