Amazon, Google, and Meta have all the essential ingredients (compute, GenAI tools, and rich data) to automate digital advertising at massive scale, including creative generation.
But how should other platforms like Walmart, Netflix, and Uber respond? Each possesses unique datasets though currently lack the comprehensive capabilities to fully leverage GenAI at scale. Capturing share among millions of advertisers (many of whom will be entirely new) hinges on their ability to quickly build integrated partnerships or make strategic acquisitions.
Yes, LLMs can already produce creative assets, from a hamburger to a USB cable. And the ecosystem is actively exploring these capabilities. However, scaling isn’t just about raw creative generation. Quality, relevance, and effectiveness are data-driven. Platforms must learn rapidly from what resonates, continuously tuning models using contextual signals and performance metrics.
Three challenges stand out:
🚀 – Speed: Digital advertising has operated sub-200ms delivery for decades. But contextual, real-time creative generation demands performance that’s an order of magnitude faster.
🎯 – Precision: Platforms will require steerable GenAI tools that not only produce visually appealing assets but continuously optimize based on direct feedback loops—views, engagement rates, and conversions.
🔌 – Connectivity: Integrating proprietary data/signals into third-party platforms will be critical, but many aren’t currently architected to ingest custom data or actionable feedback loops.
Google and Amazon could offer this as integrated services (e.g., GCP/Gemini, AWS/Nova). Meta, too, could provide open-source generative tools optimized explicitly for ad effectiveness. Alternatively, the market might prefer independence: OpenAI could step forward, providing challenger platforms a neutral compute/GenAI infrastructure to privately connect their datasets as well as share outcomes (e.g. imagine a Conversions API from OpenAI).
Meanwhile, emerging startups are already collapsing this stack, directly helping SMBs with performance-driven creative and automated advertising. Some are prime acquisition candidates, particularly for platforms eager to take on the leaders.