Monday Briefing: Meta's Ad AI Has a Hallucination Problem

Good morning, it's James here. Meta spent $2 billion on an AI tool that's supposed to automate ad buying. Media buyers are already calling its outputs unreliable. Meanwhile, the best marketing campaign of the month cost a company exactly nothing. Let's get into it.

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The Lead: Meta's AI Ad Buyer Has a Hallucination Problem

Meta launched Manus, its AI agent tool for automated campaign analysis and ad buying, into Ads Manager in February. The company acquired the technology from Butterfly Effect for a reported $2 billion, and the ambition is clear. Fully automated ad buying by year-end (Digiday).

The tool can run competitor analysis, pull campaign performance, research audiences, and compile reports. On paper, it's the kind of workflow automation that should excite any CMO managing a large Meta spend.

Only problem? It makes things up.

Chris Rigas, VP of media at Markacy, told Digiday he won't send Manus outputs to clients. "Right now I'm not taking any of the outputs and sending them to clients because they're just not reliable enough." Ryan Schuster, director of paid search and social at Brainlabs, was more blunt about the risk. "I've seen a lot of the early adopters that automated tasks get really hurt in the long term when chatbots were hallucinating data."

Why CMOs should care: Meta isn't building a helper tool. The endgame is replacing the people buying your ads. If you're spending seven figures on Meta and your agency is already adopting Manus, you need to know what's being automated and what's being verified. The tool is fast. But fast and wrong is worse than slow and right.

The take: AI automation of ad buying is inevitable. But Meta rushing a hallucinating tool into production tells you something about their priorities. They want to disintermediate agencies faster than the technology is ready for. CMOs should be asking their media teams one question this week, are you using Manus, and if so, who's checking the work?

Musical Chairs

DoorDash's Kofi Amoo-Gottfried is stepping down in May after seven years as the company's first and only CMO (Adweek). Under his watch, DoorDash captured 67% delivery market share and won the 2024 Cannes Lions Titanium Grand Prix for the "DoorDash-All-The-Ads" Super Bowl campaign. His departure note was characteristically thoughtful, "How we spend our time has tremendous power. In many ways, it's all the power we have." No successor named yet. When a CMO leaves at the top, the signal is worth noting.

Delta's Alicia Tillman is out as CMO, replaced by Ranjan Goswami with an expanded title, “Chief Marketing and Product Officer” (CBS News). The title expansion is the story. Delta is merging marketing and product into one seat, a move that reflects how deeply customer experience and brand messaging are converging at the best-run companies. Expect more CMOs to inherit "and Product" in their titles by year-end.

Brand Spotlight

A 22-year-old Staples print specialist named Kaeden Rowland became the most effective marketer in America this quarter without a single dollar of paid spend.

Posting under @blivxx on TikTok, Rowland started filming ASMR-style videos in January from behind the counter of her upstate New York store, clicking her long fingernails on her name badge while walking viewers through niche Staples services like passport renewals, custom mugs, and direct mail campaigns. Her videos started hitting 4 to 6.5 million views each. She has 472,000 followers. Customers started showing up at Staples stores saying they came because of her videos (CNN).

Staples leaned in. Corporate met with Rowland, the official brand TikTok comments on her posts, and the company's CMO publicly endorsed her (Fast Company).

Why this matters beyond the virality: Every brand is paying influencers six figures for what a frontline employee did for free. The difference is authenticity you can't buy. Rowland's content works because she actually works there and genuinely finds the products interesting. No brief, no approval chain, no creative agency. Just personality and a phone.

If you're a CMO spending millions on influencer programs, ask yourself, do you have a Kaeden Rowland on your team, and would you let her post?

The Reading List

• "Agencies grapple with economics of a new marketing currency: the AI token" .Coca-Cola's last campaign burned 70,000 prompts and millions of tokens. Agencies are split on whether to charge clients per token, absorb costs, or bundle them into retainers. The pricing model for AI work is getting figured out in real time. (Digiday)

• "Amazon and Walmart at the Top, While the Rest Battle for Scraps" .Amazon pulled $21.3 billion in ad revenue last quarter. Walmart did $6.4 billion for the full year. Target, the next closest: $915 million. Retail media is a two-player game. (Adweek)

• "69% of marketers report zero career progression" .Marketing Week surveyed 2,350 marketers and found the career ladder is broken at every level. Even 67.3% of CMOs and directors reported no advancement in the past year. (Marketing Week)

• "Illuminari consultancy launches" .Les Binet, Rory Sutherland, Richard Shotton, and Dr. Karen Nelson-Field formed a marketing effectiveness collective. Sutherland's framing is marketing has become "broken by becoming excessively conformist." (Marketing Week)

One More Thing

Meta spends $2 billion to automate ad buying and the tool hallucinates. A Staples employee spends $0 and drives more genuine brand engagement than most influencer programs. DoorDash's most successful CMO ever walks away because he decided how he spends his time matters more than how he spends a budget.

There's a pattern in all of this. The technology is getting faster. The humans who break through are the ones who are getting more real. Those two things aren't in conflict. They're the same opportunity.

See you next Monday. Make it count.

-- James