Meta used Advertising Week in New York to push its advertising platform further toward a simple proposition: give the system your products and your goals, and let its AI make the ads. In an October 6 announcement covered by PYMNTS and others, the company expanded Ads Creative Studio to more advertisers, made its Advantage+ Creative video generation generally available, and added in-chat checkout through its Business Agent on Messenger in partnership with Shopify.
The creative tools are the headline for most media teams. Advantage+ Creative can now generate video ads from existing static assets — product photos and catalog images become multi-scene video without a shoot. Ads Creative Studio goes further, letting advertisers generate video concepts and then edit them with controls for hooks, audio, clip length, text overlays, captions and end scenes. Video can also be generated directly from product catalog listings. Meta’s pitch leans on behavior it can see across its own apps: more than 60 percent of the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram is now spent with video, according to the company.
The second half of the announcement is about finding customers rather than making creative. Meta expanded its AI business assistant with memory of past campaigns, seasonality and stated goals, plus the ability for advertisers to import brand voice guidelines and strategy documents. Advertisers can also schedule the assistant to deliver recurring performance reports and alerts. A new Customer Lifecycle Strategy tool is available to all advertisers, offering AI-aligned audience recommendations for different stages of the customer relationship — including, for acquisition campaigns, recommendations on excluding existing customers so buyers do not have to assemble those exclusions by hand.
Commerce closes the loop. Through the Business Agent on Messenger, shoppers can now check out inside the conversation, with Shopify powering the transaction. Meta is also testing direct checkout for Meta AI with payment partners Adyen, PayPal, Shopify and Stripe, so a purchase that starts as a question to an AI assistant does not have to end on a separate website.
For agencies, the shift in craft is clear. When the platform generates the video, assembles the audience and takes the payment, the human work moves upstream: feeding the system clean product data, distinctive brand assets and honest performance signals, then judging which of the machine’s variations deserve budget. The teams that treat Advantage+ as a production department rather than a rival are the ones most likely to benefit. The risk runs the other way — thousands of advertisers generating similar video from similar catalogs will make distinctive creative more valuable, not less, because the feed will fill with competent, forgettable ads.
Meta is not asking advertisers to trust the automation eventually. It is building a workflow where automation is simply how a campaign gets made.
Related reading: Google Ads Gives AI Max a Dashboard: New Columns Expose the Targeting Behind the Automation
