Meta Wants to Run all of Advertising. So Doesn't it Need to be in TV?

And are we sure this is what brands want?

For a dude once known for sweating in public, Mark Zuckerberg sure isn’t shy.

As his company navigates a crucial anti-trust trial, the Meta founder and CEO is pretty much telegraphing that he’d like own pretty much all of the advertising business.

Zuck has already stated his vision for media buying on Meta platforms, when last July he told investors that: “over the long term, advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we're going to go do the rest for them.”

And over the last few years, the company’s AI ad buying has been so good that Meta was barely hurt by Apple’s seemingly devastating move to lock down sharing across mobile apps.

Now, Zuckerberg wants his company’s AI tools to be used more broadly, basically to handle ad creation in full, per the Wall Street Journal.

That ambitious goal certainly makes sense on Meta’s own properties, - as agencies and brands already churn out tons of variations of ad placements per campaign - and you could certainly see Meta’s tools being really good at originating such ads - at least for Meta properties.

But to truly disrupt the ad economy, and set its sights on the whole ad enchilada, doesn’t Meta need in on TV somehow? Even in a mobile-centric, algo-driven world, TV still matters, and TV advertising campaigns still drive marketing culture…at least for now.

Yet to date, Meta has been largely, almost deliberately, absent from TV.

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Let’s review:

• There were several occasions when Meta took biggish swings at creating a central video hub for consumers. You may recall Facebook Watch, and its string of originals (“Ball in the Family”), as well as IGTV - which oddly launched around the same time. Neither gained much traction, and never made their way to the TV screen.

• Meta does boast of massive video viewership thanks to Instagram, and increasingly Reels - yet both are purely mobile experiences. I suppose Reels could become an app on your TV screen. Yes, YouTube Shorts seem to work on TV - probably thanks in large part to YouTube proper being huge on TV. Yet TikTok hasn’t worked here, probably for good reason

• Despite the ongoing boom, Meta has pretty much sat out CTV. It could of course, push into TV via getting access to ad inventory, or via the ad tech route.

• It’s easy to forget that, even as it’s lumped together with Google, Meta doesn’t really do ad tech. Aside from a few short-lived daliances (Liverail, Atlas), Meta hasn’t really shown an inclination to get its hands dirty in programmatic.

So, how could Meta ‘get into TV’?

• It could launch its own TV OS. That seems very hard.

• It could buy something like Telly

• As I predicted like 10 years ago, Meta could buy Roku, and gain instant access to TV ad tech, great data, and streaming inventory. Makes a ton of sense. Did I mention however that Meta is involved in an anti-trust lawsuit?

• It could launch a streaming service and launch a whole bunch of pricey shows. Sure. That would probably cost almost as much as competing in large language model.

• It could snatch up an ailing cable system, like Comcast’s Versant or the new Warner Bros. cable spinoff. Yet linear TV is really not where AI seems best applied.

• It could cut a bunch of deals with independent streamers - like say AMC+, or try to salvage something like Crackle.

• Or maybe it turns to a Comcast or WBD or Paramount and offers to sell some of their CTV inventory, as an alternative to Amazon and Google, who are trying to beat them in streaming. Sound crazy? Maybe. But, guess what Meta has, that everybody in TV says they want? Millions of small advertisers.

  

  Why would Meta bother?

• You could argue that the $70 billion TV ad market, which still incredibly vibrant, isn’t enough of a game changer for a company like Meta. Madison and Wall analyst Brian Wieser doubts this is where Meta is headed, given the production costs involved. “Probably 90% of their customer base doesn’t buy any TV,” he said.

  “I don’t think any of the AI-generated creative solutions they have been talking about is relevant to the advertisers who use TV.”

• You could argue that Meta really just wants to take work from creative agencies, and that brands could simply just use Meta’s AI tools to originate and test creative on Facebook and Instagram - and then move those ads to TV. In other words, Meta isn’t necessarily making a play for ‘TV Money’ but rather ‘All the Ad Money.’

• So maybe Meta could go out and just buy TV ad inventory as needed (like through the Trade Desk) to test and learn and get its AI Ad Maker smarter.

Yeah, but:

• Don’t you need tons of data to make these AI platforms smarter?

• Don’t Meta’s current AI campaigns work because the company tests and runs them in front of real users on all sorts of real inventory in real time to refine performance over time?

• If that’s the case, doesn’t Meta need access to lots of TV ad campaigns and TV ad inventory to really nail Zuck’s stated goal?

A few last points:

Are we sure that advertisers even want this? That’s a big open question. Every agency is clearly thinking about how to better implement AI technology, to streamline operations, reduce staff, and ideally produce better work. And every brand wants more assurances that its campaigns will ‘work’ and that its spending won’t be wasted. When it comes to Meta and media optimization - performance brands are all in - and seem very comfortable letting smart algorithms figure out where their ads should run and who they should target.

But as for the big idea - do we really think that Meta’s tech, or another AI platform - is going to able to come up with a “Progressive Becoming Your Parents” or “Dove Real Women” type of campaign on its own?

Even if it could, do brands really want to hand all of their market intelligence, creative vision, expertise and reason for being to a platform? Just look at how Procter & Gamble is talking about its own investments in AI marketing (thanks Madison and Wall).

I actually had Dr. Mark Grether SVP & General Manager, PayPal Ads, on my podcast this week (in an episode that hits tomorrow, and he expressed his doubts about Meta’s chances of gobbling up all of ad production and buying. “[I’m not sure that is “something which is realistically happening in any short period of time,” he said.

“And the reason why I'm wondering is that because if you are a brand, one thing is to have the best creative, to have the best media optimization and so on and so forth. But at the end of the day, you actually would like to compete versus other brands. You want to increase your market share…

“What if all the brands just go to Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg has one black box? What's the differentiation? How do you win?”

The more I think about it, this feels like a classic Zuckerberg misread of how real humans think, as well as a stark demonstration that he knows very little about the business he is in, one from which he has made billions.

What do you think?