Growth Intelligence Brief #2

Exclusive strategy assessment tool, Meta automates advertising, system prompt leak, AI disrupts everything

Jun 13, 2025

∙ Paid

Welcome to another Growth Intelligence Brief, where organic growth leaders discover what matters—getting insights into the bigger picture and guidance on how to stay ahead of the competition.

Today’s Growth Intelligence Brief went out to 350 marketing leaders (+52 since the last issue).

Here’s what’s covered this week:

NEW Interactive Tool: Product-Led SEO Strategy Assessment
Top headlines
SEO landscape check
Content snacks

Meta aims to fully automate advertising with AI by 2026

Meta plans to fully automate its advertising process using AI by the end of 2026, enabling brands to generate complete ad campaigns (including images, videos, and text) by simply providing a product image and a budget.

Here’s what happened:

The Reuters report, indicates that:

Brands could only need to supply a single product image and a budget, after which Meta’s AI will generate multiple ad variants across formats (static, video, carousel).
The AI system will handle targeting decisions, using real-time signals to match ads with users most likely to convert.
Ad personalization at hyper-scale: Each viewer may see a bespoke version of an ad (different creative copy, imagery tweaks) based on their profile and behavior.
Industry talk indicates competitors like Snap, Pinterest, and Reddit are accelerating similar AI investments, while advertisers voice concerns about content quality, brand safety, and the loss of human creative nuance

Why this news matters:

It signals a seismic shift in digital marketing, where routine campaign creation and optimization tasks could move from human teams to AI systems, potentially ousting agency roles and skill requirements. Granted, this is already happening - but this shift indicates it is happening at scale.
For brands, it promises faster, data-driven ad execution at scale, but also raises questions around creative control, brand safety, and the future of humans in ad strategy.

My take on this:

It seems scary, and I understand why agencies and media are up in arms about this.

Unfortunately, traditional media is losing even more pull as an advertising platform because they cannot compete with Meta’s capabilities. And they’re at risk of losing even more ad revenue. Agencies obviously lose money because their services are no longer needed for advertising legwork.

And yet, the automation of advertising has been in the making for a while.

AND: You cannot push back on technological progress. Efficiency wins.

I expect Google to push in the same direction, and my worry is that we’re getting closer to a future where companies add their credit card details and Alphabet / Meta does the rest - all in a black box.

The loss in ad performance transparency would top off the data loss from AI Overviews / AI Mode. Right now, I hope we can eventually pay for keyword data in Search to get an idea of impressions and clicks in AI-based answers, but the automation of advertising could cross those plans.

At the same time, automation could enable marketers to find winning copy and creative at rapid pace.

Here’s what to do:

My suggestion is to try new ad automation features out as quickly as possible.

And then?

Bring the learnings back to other teams so they can use them for other marketing activities.

It could look like this:

Performance marketing uses the new automated feature to run many advertising campaigns that quickly determine the winning copy/creative combo.
Performance marketing shares reports with SEO, product marketing, social media, and other teams.
Collaborating teams use the insights (eg, which copy resonates best) to optimize landing pages, social media campaigns, or blog content.

Use this change to your advantage: Advertising becomes a rapid testing engine for marketing - even more than it already is.

The key is that teams collaborate. The ones that share learnings and implement them the fastest will win.