The performance benefits ushered in by artificial intelligence (AI) have been driving a “cautious optimism” among advertisers, said Meta’s head of global business, Nicola Mendelsohn, at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Mendelsohn said that Meta’s range of AI tools had driven “a 32 per cent increase” in ROAS on average and led to a “cautious optimism in the air”.
This optimism, Mendelsohn said, extends to advertisers of all sizes.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re the world’s biggest advertiser or the world’s smallest advertiser, you still have access to the same tools. And so they’re using all of them. I mean, they’re really enjoying the Meta Advantage suite of products,” she said.
Speaking on a panel hosted by Yahoo Finance, Mendelsohn was asked by the interviewer whether Meta had been a beneficiary of advertising boycotts on Twitter/X. However, Mendelsohn, refusing to be drawn on the topic, said that “it’s about where advertisers are getting their performance. And what advertisers are telling us that they’re getting really strong performance on our platforms”.
However, she also added that we were living in uncertain times. While not traditionally good for business, Mendelsohn said that advertisers were “getting more comfortable in uncertainty”. That uncertainty extends to the US Presidential Election, with Donald Trump winning the Iowa Caucus.
“What we’re hearing from advertisers is they really want to understand what we’re doing when it comes to elections. And we’re not sitting here waiting every four years for what’s going on in American elections. Actually, we’re working on elections all over the world every year. And we’re constantly working out what our playbook is, to think about it like that. So one of the things that we will do that we do with elections all around the world is actually to set up a special unit that works on the election,” she said.
“And what you’ll see is a week before the actual election in America, we will stop any new advertising. And the reason for that is that we wouldn’t have time to go and actually check the validity of the claims being made. So we think that’s a really important thing when it comes to the election”.
