[Music] [Cecilia Seitun] Hello, everyone. My name is Cecilia Seitun, and I lead the Creative Shop team at Meta covering the Americas. In case you don't know what the Creative Shop team is or what we do, we're a group of creative strategists at Meta, and our mission is to discover and democratize the power of creativity in our platform to help businesses of all sizes improve their performance.
It's an exciting time, right? AI is opening doors every day in both how content is being distributed and how now it's being produced. And there's still a lot to be discovered, but there's one thing I feel certain about, and this is that creativity is essential for us to succeed in this new era of AI. And today, I'm happy to be talking about how the creative process is being reimagined in this new era. We often talk about this ocean of culture that is alive in our platform, where people come to connect with each other with their brands and with their passions. We're seeing how one creator who filmed this beautiful underwater dance inspires another one to reinterpret it in origami. And we're seeing how brands are connecting with artists in new ways to reinvent how stories are being told in this beautiful expression of lo-fi yet high craft aesthetics that we constantly talk about.
And this goes all the way to the incredible creativity of small businesses and how they're using visual hook hackings to connect with culture and, of course, to promote themselves. I mean, it's impossible not to watch, right? And all of this incredible thriving creativity happens every minute of every single day in our platforms. Just one day, more than Three billion people come here to belong, to be a part of this shared humanity. The amount of content that they produce, consume, and share is rapidly accelerating too, 3.5 billion, that's 40,000 reels reshared every second. This is way more than last year.
And, occasionally, this shared humanity shares a single focus of attention, whether it's the eclipse or Taylor Swift herself. Yet despite this all happening in one moment, we're all seeing it from different perspectives. You might see Taylor at the game. I might see her doing yoga, and someone else might see her with a friend in a concert. And regardless of this being this huge cultural moment or billions of individuals' daily moments, this creates culture. And this culture that's living in our platforms is being woven together by our discovery engine, connecting us to the content that we want to see at the moments that we want to see it, 50% of Instagram's content is suggested by our discovery engine. This is doubled from last year. And this is important because this connective power is showing a 25% increase in video watch time globally, year over year.
So how do we succeed in this complex ecosystem? How do we maximize this discovery engine? Over the years, we found that there are, like, Three really important steps to do so. The first one is that campaigns must originate from culture. This means using the language and the grammar of our platform, being authentic, digestible with a lo-fi, high craft aesthetics that I mentioned. This means leaning into the medium's intimacy and immediacy that we know works. The second one is to collaborate with culture. This means releasing the grip of the brand, working with creators, stepping into their communities. Today's brands are not solely built by us, the marketers. They are built by these communities and these creators, and collaborating with them should be at the center of your brand strategy, ensuring a cultural connection, a creative diversification, and to be honest, lowering production costs. And the third one is to create at the speed of culture, and this means maximizing the performance of our discovery engine. Creative is the new targeting. The more diverse assets you'll throw into the system, the better the system is going to connect your content with your audience and expand it into new ones. So in order to achieve this, we believe there has to be a pivot in the way we think, where we're shifting from this traditional well known big idea construct with one central idea and a series of matching executions to building a system of ideas. And this means creating a unique brand ethos that is capable of flexing to be expressed in different ways to different audiences in different surfaces but without sacrificing consistency, which is hard. To build this system of ideas requires organizations to start acting more like organisms, and this means being flexible, being permeable, being nimble. This means looking inside and for silos and eliminating the silos. And this means, most importantly, revisiting our relationship with partners to motivate them and incentivize them for outcomes, not for outputs.
But how do we fuel the system of ideas while ensuring brand consistency and building brand equity over time? And this is where we start talking about this brand ethos.
We need to have a strong and clear brand ethos. The ethos is way more than your brand guidelines. It's the values, the mission, the purpose. It's the actions and the behaviors that results in your brand reputation. This is the spirit and the glue that binds all of the modalities of your brand in the mind of your audience. It's how you make people feel when they experience and share your brand. So a strong brand ethos is capable of flexing to be expressed in different ways to different audiences in different surfaces, always without sacrificing this brand consistency. So this year, we've seen a great amount of examples from brands and agencies leaning into this new mentality. I will talk about McDonald's and how they have been moving from this traditional product campaign to tapping into these cultural truths and embracing these systems of ideas. And the nice thing about McDonald's is that it's just not a one off. They understand the importance of creating systems of ideas at the speed of culture, and they've done it over and over again. From the nostalgia of the Grimace for the purple McFlurry, all the way to the anime of WcDonald's for McNuggets, and recently with Grandma McFlurry. So I'm going to jump into this third one with Grandma McFlurry.
The first thing they did is to originate from culture. So they jumped into this ocean of culture, and they realized that nostalgia was trending in Gen Z. And they also found that Grandma Core, the hashtag, was one of those trends. So they saw the opportunity to bring it all together. So what was this fun truth, how they call it, this insight? It's that grandparents are the heroes when they take their kids to McDonald's for a treat because, honestly, we all know that they let them have dessert before dinner, right? So they originated from culture. They took it a step further, and they collaborated with culture. So they launched this campaign through a series of beautiful reels and stories that reignited this nostalgia of a trip to McDonald's with our grandma. And then they went to this final step. So they originated from culture, they collaborated from culture, and they created at the speed of culture. This became a set of diverse assets that they utilized the entire ecosystem of Meta canvases. The campaign was so successful that the McFlurry sold out in only three weeks into the promotion.
I am aware that this systems of ideas requires us to produce more diverse and constant content, and I know it's a lot. But there's good news. There's this study from McKinsey that shows that companies that prioritize creativity have 67% above average market value. So then why don't they all? The reason is that there's this tension between the CMOs push for innovation and the CFOs push for efficiencies. The good news is that this paradigm that we all know, quality, speed, cost, choose two, is becoming obsolete because AI is blurring these lines.
Thanks to the many GenAI tools out there and large language models, like my beautiful friend, Llama three here, we're accelerating our ability to originate and create at the speed of culture.
There are three distinct buckets where AI is helping us enhance our creative workflow. Illumination, which is what we call sort of the insight stage, ideation, and creation. So some of what I'm about to share, clients are already putting into action, that is great, while others are capabilities that are emerging. All of them represent what's possible in the creative marketing landscape today. So let's start with illumination. As we look forward, many LLMs may be used to create datasets that can offer marketeers a deeper understanding of insights on what's working and what's not. This means turning around into the back end, looking at the thousands of ads that a certain brand run, and using GenAI to identify what are those features within the ad that are performing better or worse so we can leverage that data when we're creating new pieces of content. Imagine, that would accelerate the learning process, allowing marketeers to optimize campaigns with solutions that are built with data that has already been validated.
Your content creation would become more targeted and more effective, and you will reduce costs and save time. So think about, like, an ad. Any ad. Doesn't need to be on a specific platform. You have mechanical features, things like aspect ratio or, like, the format of the ad. And then you go deeper in this rabbit hole, and you have the visuals and sort of the copy aspects of the ad, right? You have branding. You have text overlay. You have, like, the setting where the ad is set. And we can even go further along this rabbit hole and go all the way into motivators and tone and even emotions. For instance, we might be able to understand that humor performs better than no humor. And I believe that in the future, we will be able to understand it, that humor is actually funny. Right? So how does this work? If you think about these large language models, the way that we communicate with them is through prompting, right, which is basically questions. So in this case, we can look at the emotions of the ads running, and we can ask, like, "Describe the emotion of the image. Is there a laugh, joy, surprise?" Or maybe the design, like, "How big is the brand or the logo in the ad? And is it making it perform better or worse?" Or even the setting, like, "Is it an inside setting or an outside setting?" And it might be that the outside setting performs better than the inside setting. Or the people in the ad, "Are there any people? And if there are more than one, like, are there different genders, different ages? And what performs better?" Not for everyone, but for me, for my brand, for my audience.
So armed with all of these insights, these really powerful insights, we enter into the phase where we can use AI for ideation.
And there are many AI tools out there that can help you in this phase, and in fact, they're popping up everywhere. Personally, of course, I use Meta AI, but it's an incredible creative companion capable of helping us with many different things. It can help us discover new creators. It can help us unlock new audiences, and it can help us find reels and content for inspiration all the way to, like, brainstorming content ideas. Powered by my friend, Llama three, this, if you can believe it, is open and free for all to use. So that's why I joke and say that llama is my spirit animal and my co-presenter in this presentation. But let me show you, as a creative, how I use this Imagine feature of Meta AI. But before we do, I want to talk a little bit about the ability to put your vision into words. I like to joke and say that this is kind of going back to the golden era of copywriters because we call this process Prompt Whispering. This is kind of the creative sculpting act. It's our ability to put experiences, our creativity, our storytelling skills to get the machine to actually understand and imagine what's inside our heads, and this is extremely critical. So let's begin.
Imagine a cup of delicious hot coffee. Good, but we need to start generating some appetite appeal, right? So the steam is rising from the surface. The brown liquid is silky, smooth, and aromatic.
But we learned from the Illumination stage that an outside setting would perform better. So maybe now put it in a field. The field is lush and green, and there's a mountain in the distance. But we also learned, tapping into these large language models, that an origin story will give the perception of quality. So in fact, let's make it in Colombia. Good. And we learned that nostalgia was a powerful motivator in the coffee industry and helped our ads perform better. So make it in the style of a 1960s illustration. But we need to push our direction a little bit more, right, to make it more ownable. So make it more impressionistic. No. It's not bold enough. I want it bold like coffee. So maybe pop art colors? Good. One more thing. Where's my friend? Where's my llama? There you go. Perfect. So although you can't use this precise image in your campaign, with the inspiration and the many possibilities, you can go to production, hire illustrators, photographers, designers. Many of them are already using AI features at their disposal. And with the many tools out there, including the amazing tools that Adobe is presenting these days, you can produce a diverse set of assets with speed, quality, and low cost. So when you upload these creative assets, if you need to further diversify these assets, you can leverage our tools that are rapidly getting more and more sophisticated all the way from the ability to create variations of your ad creative visuals to generating new cases with text that matches your brand tone and voice, and the background expression features will make it easier for your content to fit naturally throughout our interconnected ecosystem of canvases.
So it's a continuous learning and optimization process. Your creative input feeds the Auction. It creates a stronger performance. You extract these learnings. The learnings go back into the illumination and ideation and creation phases, and this creates a virtuous loop. And this is how you fuel the discovery engine, this weaver of culture. So in closing, yes, AI tools are a step change in how we develop brands, but it's important to understand that they are just that. They are just tools. Tools that empower us to think bigger, to move faster, and to increase the fidelity of our ideas. So in closing, I wanted to say as a creative leader in my organization that it's becoming clear to me that creative might be automized but creativity will never be. Thank you very much.
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