Meta Puts a Timeline on the Outcomes Era: How Adtech Should Respond
Meta just put a timeline on the Outcomes Era.
The WSJ reported Meta "aims to enable brands to fully create and target ads using artificial intelligence by the end of next year."
We've been heading in this direction for a while. But Meta is now putting a deadline on the inflection point after which every media and adtech company will need to stand up to the standard: "Tell me the outcome you want, and we'll deliver it with virtually no legwork from you."
This dynamic is already shaping the entire rest of the ad industry, and if Meta is truly able to hit that target by 2026, it'll only intensify the pressure on all adtech and media companies to deliver automated outcomes. How are we seeing this play out across adtech and media?
1. The entire performance TV category is a response to this dynamic. It asks, "What if we could make TV as automatic and measurable as search and social?" This will affect ecommerce marketers (who tend to be more performance-oriented), SMBs (same thing but a harder audience to win at scale), and finally big brands. I believe all of TV advertising will ultimately catch up to this model, which is why I am bullish on Sharp Pen client tvScientific.
2. Retail media is ballooning and evolving due to the same pressure. On the one hand, retail media has a huge advantage in this regard because, like paid search, it involves capitalizing on attention from customers near the point of sale (which makes driving performance easy). On the other hand, for the very same reason, retail media’s incrementality is suspect. This is one of the big questions of the Outcomes Era: are the outcomes a given media seller or adtech platform drives incremental? Or are they relatively meaningless outcomes because they would’ve happened anyway? Arguing that your outcomes are incremental is therefore one of the main ways to go to market in this era of automated outcomes.
3. Holdcos were down on Meta's latest news, and they’re clearly positioning themselves to compete in the Outcomes Era. WPP is repositioning to go all in on AI. Publicis is trying to leverage its data advantage to compete (hence Epsilon being at the core of all its messaging). And Omnicom CEO John Wren recently said that, for the first time, "all" of advertising is "measurable." Folks often point out that the Outcomes Era isn’t new. To an extent, that’s true, but it has recently intensified, largely thanks to AI, and the stalwarts of Madison Avenue are now racing to catch up to it. (Of course, holdcos and big brands won’t entirely adopt end-to-end automation. But don’t miss the point: the industry is still moving in that direction, as Kokai and ViantAI indicate. The future of advertising is, as the Vanderhooks like to say, autonomous. It will just be a gradual shift in that direction. It won’t happen at the flip of a switch.)
From a go-to-market perspective, no adtech or media company can ignore the Outcomes Era. In advertising, the new version of “eat or be eaten” is “drive outcomes or be driven out of business by someone who does.” The upshot is that you have to go to market by arguing:
You drive incremental outcomes whereas the walled gardens do not.
You are transparent, showing how you drive the outcomes so marketers can independently verify the results, repurpose the learnings, and iterate.
You drive outcomes more efficiently.
Zuckerberg recently said Meta's AI vision will amount to a "redefinition of the category of advertising." Yes: a redefinition of advertising into an automated outcomes machine (i.e. the Outcomes Era). It's now set to arrive by 2026.
But how incremental those outcomes are and how transparently they're being driven will be the key fault lines in the new ad industry. And those fault lines — incrementality, transparency, full-funnel results — are the issues that you want to exploit if you’re an open internet adtech company competing with the giants.
