Zuck’s interview with Stratechery was an AI advertising power flex

Once again, Meta is flexing its power over advertisers.

If you caught Zuck's interview with Stratechery last week, you might have been impressed with his vision for an AI-powered ad future. But it's less about making it easier for businesses and much more about making it easier for Meta.

In the interview, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a vision for AI-driven advertising that’s seamless and automated. As someone who’s analyzed social platforms and social media advertising for two decades, I can’t help but see another layer:

1) More power centralized in Meta’s hands

2) Less choice for advertisers.

These are the most revealing quotes from the interview—and why they matter:

“We’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out."

➡️ Meta’s goal is full automation. It sounds efficient, but it also sidelines the advertiser’s control over creative, targeting and strategy. If Meta handles everything, what leverage do advertisers really have?

“We believe at this point that we are just better at finding the people who are going to resonate with your product than you are.”

➡️ This sounds like a dream for a small business. But for larger advertisers with brand guidelines, nuanced messaging goals and the need for visibility into how dollars are spent, it’s a different story. Infinite creative may also mean infinite unpredictability.

“It is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”

➡️ If Meta's talking about redefining advertising, that logically also raises Meta’s significant influence in the ad ecosystem. If advertisers don’t like the direction this is going, will they vote with their dollars and shift spend elsewhere? Most can't (or won't). Meta is too essential.

It's important context that this is all happening against the backdrop of antitrust scrutiny. The current Meta antitrust trial focuses on whether Facebook squashed business competition by acquiring rivals WhatsApp and Instagram. The Google antitrust trial focused on consumers losing choice.

Meta’s automated ad future raises parallel questions:

❓ Are advertisers losing choice too?
❓If Meta owns the product, the creative, the targeting and the distribution—what’s left for the advertiser to own?

Are there alternate ways I should be looking at Meta's moves in AI and advertising? I genuinely want to know.