We Tested Meta’s AI. The Results Were…Interesting

We’ve been putting the latest and most talked about AI tools to the test. One in particular stood out, and not in the way you might hope.

The AI boom has reshaped the digital landscape, with marketing agencies racing to introduce tools that promise to make our work easier. Yet despite the fanfare, teams like ours remain cautious. Intrigued by AI’s potential, but not quite ready to hand over the reins. 

In 2022, Meta introduced Advantage+, a suite of AI-powered tools in Meta Business Manager designed to optimize campaign performance. These systems were built to handle much of the manual labor we once put into building and managing paid social advertising campaigns. And while many of these features do help streamline the process, we remain wary of letting the AI-powered tools fully replace human skill. 

So our paid experts put Meta’s AI to the test. The results were… interesting.

We asked the Advantage+ Creative tool to generate variations of a graphic created by our in-house design team. The original featured ski products from one of our sports clients, modeled by both a male and female consumer.

What did AI produce? Nothing remotely close. Instead, it returned an image with both models essentially merged into one. A comical outcome that made “room for improvement” feel like an understatement.

Thankfully, our team never launches ads without thorough review. If we did, we could’ve ended up promoting something wildly off-brand and unrecognizable.

Has every AI tool produced results like this? No. In many situations, AI in digital advertising serves as a valuable resource. But like any tool, it has limits, and relying on it blindly is a path we’d never recommend taking. Marketers should remain pragmatic about AI’s role in their work, ensuring every output undergoes human review and refinement.

When it comes to creative work, AI shows promise in removing barriers and enhancing results. Yet nuance, context, and emotional insight remain uniquely human, keeping our use of artificial intelligence purposeful but selective.