Meta wants to replace your marketing department

Where I’ve worked, Meta (or Facebook beforehand) has always been a key part of the marketing mix. It’s a no brainer, in theory. It works. You give Meta an objective in its Ads product, it gives you a measurable result. It has been a huge driver of growth for the adoption of apps in particular – Ben Thompson of Stratechery gives Meta more credit for the app economy than the App Store, and he’s probably right.

Meta’s ad product has grown in competence over time – it started off as a platform to measure conversion ad conversions. Then it became about reaching your target audience effectively. You tell it who to look for, it goes to look for them and shows them an ad. You pay if you convert them.

But over the last few years, Meta has begun to phase out targeting as a recommended approach to advertising. They reckon that – instead – you should feed it an objective and not worry about who you’re targeting. They’ll do that, and they think they’ll get better results for you.

Yesterday, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Ben Thompson. I recommend you read or listen to the whole thing, but here’s a few bits that stood out to me:

Yeah, it [Meta] is basically like the ultimate business agent, and if you think about the pieces of advertising, there’s content creation, the creative, there’s the targeting, and there’s the measurement and probably the first pieces that we started building were the measurement to basically make it so that we can effectively have a business that’s organized around when we’re delivering results for people instead of just showing them impressions.

But basically, we believe at this point that we are just better at finding the people who are going to resonate with your product than you are. And so, there’s that piece. But there’s still the creative piece, which is basically businesses come to us and they have a sense of what their message is or what their video is or their image, and that’s pretty hard to produce and I think we’re pretty close.

So, in Zuck’s mind, there are three facets to advertising:

1. Content creation (creative)
2. Targeting (who sees your creative)
3. Measurement (how your creative and targeting performed)

Meta started with (3), moved up the stack to (2), and thinks it can now probably crack (1).

He continues:

Yeah, or we just make it for them. I mean, obviously, it’ll always be the case that they can come with a suggestion or here’s the creative that they want, especially if they really want to dial it in. But in general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising. So if you think about what percent of GDP is advertising today, I would expect that that percent will grow. Because today, advertising is sort of constrained to like, “All right, I’m buying a billboard or a commercial…”

I can see why this is attractive, especially for small businesses or start ups: Zuckerberg is selling you a marketing department without the faff of establishing a marketing department. And small businesses don’t want to be spending time on marketing or admin or, actually, anything that distracts them from the core competency of their business. So, it makes sense?

But as a marketer, I bristled at this suggestion. Handing over your customer understanding to Facebook’s mystery box feels dangerous: you lose a fundamental understanding of your customer this way, which means you offer them an inferior product, which means you’re not as profitable, which means… well, maybe lots of businesses become mediocre and generic?

And maybe they don’t realise it as it happens, but only when it’s happened. What they really needed was actually just to understand their customers’ wants and needs in the first place, which is harder to do when you’re not learning about how to advertise to them.

Advertising (or “marketing”) to your customers, I think, is the surest route to understanding them. You can do interviews, focus groups, surveys all you want – and these are good activities in product development – but you’ll never quite know how well your product really goes down until you put it into the market with a message.

And so trying to understand how you will talk to your customers about the thing you built is the best way to build a better product. It’s my favourite tactic to try when I first meet a Product Manager – you can tell the good ones by how well they can articulate who a product is for, why they’d use it and what objections customers may have to it. Product Managers who understand these things are generally the product managers who ship successful products.

So… it seems like advertising might not just be an output, as Zuckerberg seems to suggest it is. It’s a process, that you need to follow, actually, to make good products and create better messaging.

A big part of the value of advertising, it seems, is the process you follow to get to the advert.

The journey is the destination

I was reminded about this lesson a week or so ago by Rory Sutherland on the Uncensored CMO podcast. Here’s what Rory has to say about AI:

Jeremy Bullmore said that the most valuable thing about advertising may actually be the process you go through to produce an advertisement rather than the advertisement itself.

And it's an interesting thought, which is the questions you've got to ask, which I think in cybernetics, it's called business philosophy.

What are you for?

What purpose do you serve?

What makes you different from other people?

You know, quite deep strategic questions, which generally remain unasked until you have to produce an ad.

And so the only concern for me is that if you shortcut the process to arrive very quickly at a cheap and adequate result, that's fine, unless it's the process that's valuable rather than the end result.

I think this very directly applies to the Meta Ads proposition that Zuckerberg is so excited about, in an incredibly negative way. Yes, you may be able to get a performant outcome from using Meta Ads to do everything from measurement to ad creative, but what about the journey? What about the strategic and philosophical questions that you are forced to answer yourself when you set about marketing something?

Zuckerberg is predicting, I think, that these kinds of questions will disappear entirely, as Meta picks up more and more marketshare in the advertising industry, with Meta learning how to be a better marketer than a marketer for – in theory – absolutely everyone.

Here’s the thing, though. I think the opposite is true. We will not want more self-optimisation from Meta on ad creation and targeting. Because we will lose our customer understanding muscles. The businesses that over-optimise with Meta will lose perspective: they will understand their customers less because they’ve outsourced their customer understanding engine to a mystery box that no one – not even Meta – will be able to unpick.

Brands have always wanted control. Over their message. Over their targeting. Over the creative. The look and feel. And where performance marketers may be tempted by this, and it may well work in the short term, it won't work in the long run.

That's because advertising is a process, not an outcome. The journey of self discovery that advertising often kicks off, allows companies to build on that understanding over time, with compounding effects.

Without it, companies become commodities, and commodities aren't particularly profitable.

Nor are they particularly fun to work with.