One-click generation of multi-scenario advertising videos! Meta heavily upgrades AI digital advertising tools

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Meta Platforms (META.US), the parent company of Facebook, has announced the launch of an upgraded version of its image-to-video advertising feature. This feature allows digital advertising marketers to easily convert product images into dynamic video ads across multiple scenes with just one click, using Meta's exclusive artificial intelligence ecosystem platform. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram noted that advertisers can upload up to 20 images to generate customized videos, with the AI system automatically adding music and overlaying text.

This innovative AI-based digital advertising tool was released in sync with the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity taking place in France. A Meta spokesperson did not immediately respond to media requests for comments.

This move is seen as a further step by the tech giant in the field of AI-generated advertising and "AI + advertising marketing," aiming to leverage the Meta AI large model family—the Llama series of large models—to reduce the cost of customized digital ad production and further simplify the process.

As early as May last year, Meta launched a feature that generates customized ad images using text prompts; in October 2024, it released a digital marketing advertising tool that converts images provided by advertisers into customized "AI-generated GIFs."

The social media giant is also further updating the text-to-video tool "Movie Gen" aimed at ordinary consumers, which was first launched last fall.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has consistently prioritized artificial intelligence as the company's number one priority since the global popularity of ChatGPT in 2023. Meta is competing with powerful rivals in the generative AI field, including OpenAI, Alphabet's Google, and Microsoft, to develop AI large models.

Investment in Scale AI is a stroke of genius, expected to help Meta's stock price embark on a long-term bull market trajectory

Last week, Meta announced an investment of up to $14.3 billion in AI unicorn Scale AI, acquiring a 49% stake, which values the AI startup at over $29 billion. A highlight of this significant deal in the AI field is that Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang will officially join Meta's core R&D team to lead the Meta "Super Intelligence" team focused on general artificial intelligence.

"This massive investment in Scale AI is significant and may accelerate the integration of META's namesake AI application and its monetization path," noted Geneva Investor, an analyst at Seeking Alpha, in an email to clients. "Synergies may come from more optimized data labeling compared to peers like OpenAI, significantly improving META's own models, or achieving breakthroughs in defense and military applications in collaboration with the U.S. government—both companies have reached a partnership on the Defense Llama project. So I am looking forward to what happens next." More than a decade ago, the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp has proven Meta's unique investment vision. Jonathan Weber, an influencer from the investment community Cash Flow Club, stated: "The management has performed excellently in identifying and investing in quality targets in the past, including the acquisition of Instagram over a decade ago, so I believe the risk of overpaying is not significant."

Digital advertising is the core revenue engine for Meta, and its 3 billion users are the cornerstone. Meta's AI advertising assistance tools and Meta AI have continuously helped Meta's advertising business revenue exceed expectations for several quarters. In the field of digital advertising, where Meta relies heavily, the powerful open-source AI large model launched by Meta, along with various generative AI-assisted software tools, enables advertisers to reach a broader potential user base, providing a new AI-based advertising recommendation experience for Meta's advertisers and users. This is also an important logic behind Wall Street analysts' general expectation that Meta's stock price will continue to rise.

Therefore, for Meta, in the context of global companies vying for dominance in AI applications, Scale AI may help Meta create "killer" AI applications. As a global leader in data labeling and model evaluation, Scale AI holds the "data production materials" of the AI era. Scale AI can provide industry-leading data labeling and model evaluation platforms, while Meta is eager to commercialize the Llama series large models on a large scale and deeply embed Meta AI into its social, advertising, and hardware ecosystems. Scale AI can be seen as the last key piece of Meta's "AI moat": the integration of computing power (NVIDIA AI GPU + self-developed ASIC + large-scale data centers covering the globe), large models (Llama family), and data (Scale AI)