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Meta has seen the future of advertising, and it apparently doesn’t involve you. Or at least, not the parts of you that write copy, build creatives, pick audiences, or place media. In June 2025, the company quietly announced that by the end of 2026, it intends to fully automate ad campaigns across Facebook and Instagram. Just drop in a product image, set your budget, and the AI will take it from there. No ad agency required. No creative briefs necessary. Maybe not even a marketer, if you squint hard enough.
With over 3.2 billion daily users and nearly 97% of its $134 billion in 2024 revenue coming from ads, Meta isn’t nudging gently into automation, it’s slamming the gas. The company spent over $65 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone, much of it to power this exact vision. In Q1 2025, Meta clocked nearly $35 billion in ad revenues, a significant chunk driven by early-stage automation in performance formats.
For brand marketers, the shift is not just technological, it’s philosophical. What happens when the machine starts doing not just the labour, but the thinking?
Work smarter, not harder?
“Meta’s move to automate the campaign creation and target setting processes will have deep impact,” says Prasun Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer at MagicBricks. His team runs large-scale, multi-regional campaigns with endless creative permutations, which are perfect fodder for AI tools that promise speed and scale. “It significantly reduces TAT and effort for complex campaigns,” he says. “Digital marketers will be freed up from clerical work and can refocus on sharpening campaign strategy and bidding to improve ROI.”
That refocusing, of course, comes with casualties. Kumar doesn’t sugarcoat the implications: “This may also impact the livelihood of the army of low-cost visual designers and campaign set-up executives employed by agencies.” Automation is great, until you realise what it’s automating.
At DS Group, which operates across food, wellness, and luxury, the shift is being met with both curiosity and caution. “Meta’s transition to full AI-led ad automation may accelerate and improve campaign execution, but it also gives the platform’s algorithms more control,” says Rajeev Jain, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing, DS Group. For a brand operating across multiple categories and tones, it’s a tightrope. “This implies less manual effort and better personalization at scale—but it also necessitates greater strategic control,” he adds.
That tension between speed and sovereignty is playing out across every marketing team with a brand story to protect. Jain is clear-eyed about the tradeoffs, nothing, “As AI takes over creative and targeting, the focus must turn to creating clear brand goals, guaranteeing consistency, and actively managing how the brand appears in a more automated and homogenous ad environment.”
Meta’s own pitch to marketers, naturally, focuses on the upside. The machine will take care of asset creation, versioning, and placement. All you need to do is show up with a product and a goal. But as Jain puts it, that’s not the whole picture. “Roles may shift from execution to directing AI toward culturally relevant, distinctive ads. The true value will be in human monitoring, creative judgment, and maintaining brand integrity.”
Machines know how, marketers define why
That’s a line that resonates with Nisha Khatri, Head of Marketing at Libas. The fashion brand has always moved quickly, but never at the cost of brand soul. “Meta’s AI push is reshaping the game—offering unmatched efficiency and hyper-personalization,” she says. “But while automation optimizes performance, it also reduces manual control.”
Khatri sees the future not as AI vs human, but as a handoff. “The role will shift from managing execution to guiding strategy—defining the brand narrative, ensuring alignment, and interpreting data meaningfully,” she explains. “AI supports the ‘how,’ but humans still define the ‘why.’” That belief has already shifted the internal structure at Libas: media and creative teams are evolving into what she calls “idea-drivers and data interpreters.”
There’s something hopeful in that: the machine does the mechanical, the human does the meaningful. But not everyone is convinced the split will hold.
“Full automation is useful, but dangerous if overused,” says Tanishq Ambegaokar, co-founder of nailinit. “It can help us move quicker and test smarter, but we’ll never let it dictate how we talk, look, or show up.” For a company that trades in cultural fluency, not just conversions, that’s non-negotiable.
Ambegaokar doesn’t mind handing over the repetitive stuff—but not the soul work. “Our edge comes from intuition, not just optimisation,” he says. “The ones who just follow briefs or trends will be sidelined. But the ones who shape culture, tell stories, and build emotion into brands? They’ll be more valuable than ever.”
Meta, to its credit, seems aware of this. The company has clarified that creative and media teams aren’t being written off—just rewritten. Execution is being flattened, yes, but strategy is being elevated. Zuckerberg himself has said the goal is to let businesses simply “state their objectives,” and the system will build the campaign. The narrative, presumably, still comes from you.
But if you're not careful, that’s exactly what gets automated out.
2026: Back to the future?
As Meta continues to push its AI tools deeper into advertising, the marketer’s job won’t disappear. It will mutate. The value of a brand will no longer rest on how efficiently it can launch a campaign, but on how well it can wield the machine without becoming one.
Marketers will still need to ask hard questions. Is this the right message? Does this creative align with brand tone? Are we chasing efficiency at the cost of originality? Most importantly: who’s really making the decisions here?
By the time Meta’s 2026 deadline rolls around, it may well be easier than ever to advertise. But if you're not paying attention, you might forget what you're advertising for.
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