How brands are using AI in Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns

Fashion and beauty brands are often early tech adopters. Many are digital-native, forging tailored D2C digital strategies. And there are so many competitive brands that any innovation could give one an edge, especially as the busy holiday season approaches.

Apparel and home decor retailer Tuckernuck, and beauty brand Kitsch, have adopted AI-powered tools in Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns solution to drive campaign performance on social media. Their customers are on Facebook and Instagram, and so are their prospects. The tools automate campaigns on these platforms while optimizing campaign targets. This means that instead of marketers carving out segments they think are best for the campaign, the AI discovers these optimal audiences automatically.

Why we care. Marketers are only just beginning to integrate new AI tools into their campaigns. A recent study found analytics and research use cases to be roughly twice as popular among marketers as genAI image creation. Meta’s Advantage+ roadmap follows this trend line. It includes optimization functions that aim to improve performance automatically — doing the work of analytics. On the horizon are genAI capabilities that will also help marketers create and repurpose content in ads. Some enhancement tools are already available in Advantage+ creative enhancements.

Advantage+ shopping campaigns. Advertisers who select Advantage+ creative in Meta Ads Manager can have their uploaded images and videos optimized — the tool automatically weeds out lower-performing versions of ads to find the best versions for audiences.

Advantage+ shopping campaigns combine multiple Advantage+ creative optimizations into streamlined campaigns that deliver ads to both existing customers and prospects based on the deep behavioral data Meta has on users and how ads perform during the campaign.

The Advantage+ shopping campaigns solution currently allows marketers to test up to 150 creative combinations. It then sends the top-performing ads to the highest-value consumers.

In measuring roughly one million campaigns, Meta found the solution boosted return on ad spend (ROAS) by an average of 22% when advertisers turned on the AI tools.

Optimization. Using Advantage+ shopping campaigns replaces much of the work for segmentation, according to Yingying Kuang, VP of growth and ecommerce at Kitsch.

“Meta has really evolved so much on leading with AI and cutting a lot of manual processes out to save time to focus on creative as a lever to drive our business forward,” Kuang said in a virtual roundtable hosted by Meta.

Instead of Kitsch segmenting audiences by geography and demographics ahead of a campaign, the Meta AI simply learns from how the campaign performs and targets the groups where the ads are likely to succeed.

Advertisers also have the option to customize campaigns with predetermined parameters. They don’t have to turn over all the controls to AI.

Focus on creative and customers. “What’s so challenging about creative is there’s such a small percentage of winners,” said Kuang. “Our creative process is really listening to customers first.”

Kitsch has a Facebook community of approximately 45,000 brand enthusiasts. They discuss common problems, and the Kitsch marketing team builds creative based on solutions to these problems.

Kitsch maintains a full creative team that produces 50 to 100 assets per week. The staff includes content strategists who develop ideas and scripts, as well as media buyers who look at the data and determine what’s working and what doesn’t. The AI capabilities through Meta that boost campaign performance haven’t displaced any of Kitsch’s marketing roles.

Holidays. For the holidays, Kitsch will focus on creating image ads that can be spun out quickly into multiple iterations using Advantage+ tools.

“I think the holidays are such a crazy time — the easier to get creative [assets] the better,” said Kuang. “One of the biggest learnings is that during the holidays, simple static images [and a] straightforward gifting message do well.”

Collaboration and finding new prospects. Tuckernuck lives by its creative, according to co-founder September Rinnier Votta. The company has three in-house studios for product shoots and produces a new comprehensive lifestyle campaign every month. The brand collaborates with influencers to create content, and the company also draws on its employees for inspiration.

“We have a test and learn philosophy we apply every day, creating variety and attracting customers we wouldn’t have if we were [making creative entirely] on our own,” Rinnier Votta said.

This philosophy fits nicely with the discovery of previously unknown prospects on Meta’s platforms. Marketers never know exactly who those ads will attract.

“The analysis paralysis mentality is no way to win,” said Rinnier Votta. “Just have an open mind…Believe what you’re doing, test and learn, and get better and better.”

GenAI. Currently, Advantage+ creative tools include genAI-powered visual touch-ups, text improvements and image templates. Users can add 3D animation to 2D images. Also, music can be added to image ads.

Advertisers can also use genAI to generate a background for an image with a specific object in it, as well as generate multiple kinds of backgrounds to create multiple iterations of an ad. Users can also experiment with full image generation that changes not only the background but creates an entirely new image with similar elements based on a reference ad.

Meta is also testing genAI tools that create and deploy ads from prompts, according to Karin Tracy, Meta’s head of retail, fashion and luxury. However, she acknowledged that brands will want to crawl with AI before walking or running.

“It’s really early days and will evolve over time,” she said. “Brand guidelines are incredibly important. Creativity and who your brand is will be led by brands. The way we’re helping today is with the sizing of ads, maybe backgrounds and some portion of the ad showing movement. That’s where we’re starting.”

Dig deeper: Meta rolls out genAI features for advertisers