For Meta, AI’s gains are starting to show.
"We would not have re-accelerated our revenue in the last two years if it was not for AI," Alex Schultz, CMO and vice president of analytics at Meta, said on our "Behind the Numbers" podcast. "It's that important to us. We wouldn't have recovered from AppTracking transparency [or] been able to do more with less data if it wasn't for AI. So that's the very core of our business."
From streamlining tedious processes to enabling cost-cutting analysis, AI's impact on marketing teams has steadily emerged over recent months.
In Meta's case, using AI to optimize the placement of ads has proven valuable.
"The No. 1 place where we use AI is in ranking the ads," Schultz said. "Where I'm spending the most of my time in terms of getting yield is just the optimizations in the ad system to rank and get better results from the ads and the organic impressions we're getting, which boosts the number of impressions we can show on the ads."
AI adoption still faces numerous hurdles, and about 1 in 3 CMOs said AI campaign performance needed improvement, per a Q1 2024 CMO Council survey. For Schultz, even skeptics can find marketing value in folding AI into a workflow.
"I think even people who are somewhat critical of tech are finding that AI can actually be turned into this tool for creativity," he said. "And when they're embracing it and using it as a tool, it becomes another part of the arsenal that's just like Photoshop or just like moving from a film camera to a digital camera or just like moving from painting to having film."
Marketing is a continually evolving industry, Schultz said, and AI is simply the newest tool to emerge.
"When you went from billboards to moving videos, when you went to radio, when you added in TV, when you added in color TV, when you created direct-mail databases, when email came along, when the internet came along in general, display ads, affiliates, search, mobile, social media, there's always something new," Schultz said. "And in our industry, the only constant is change."
The one concern that Schultz hears the most from his fellow CMOs? The difficulty with measuring impact. It's an issue that has grown in recent months, with a rise in signal loss due to a reduction in third-party cookies and other legacy identifiers.
"The No. 1 thing I would say is incrementality measurements," Schlutz said. "If you can do list studies with us, if you can do regional on/off tests. Don't tie yourself to last click."
He's not alone in doubting the reliability of solely using one-click attribution. Only 1 in 5 marketers are confident that last-click attribution can accurately reflect a platform's long-term impact, per a survey by EMARKETER in partnership with Snap.
"If you go into the CFO and you actually say, 'I've done last click and I haven't done any uplift experiments,' you're going to get laughed out of the room," Schultz said. "Whereas if you use lift studies and you understand that stuff, you're going to do well."