Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
At Cannes Lions 2026, the world’s most influential festival of creativity, Meta used the spotlight to announce a significant leap forward in how businesses can advertise, connect with creators, and engage customers. The announcements span three areas: AI-powered creative tools, a unified creator marketing platform, and smarter customer engagement through AI. Together, they represent a clear signal of where digital advertising is heading, and why brands that move with these changes stand to gain the most. To put the opportunity in context, Meta shared that its own analysis of over one million campaigns found advertisers were generating an average of $4.13 in revenue for every dollar spent on Meta, a 25% improvement since 2022.
AI That Learns Your Brand and Builds Your Ads
The most substantial announcement for advertisers is a new end-to-end creative solution that allows marketing teams to generate, test and refine ads far more quickly than before. At the heart of it is a feature called Brand Memory, which allows Meta’s AI to absorb the look, tone and identity of your brand from your existing advertising history, so that new content it creates feels consistent rather than generic. Rather than starting from scratch every campaign, your team gets a system that already understands what your brand looks and sounds like. Meta is building this with agencies in mind from day one, with early integration through WPP Open, meaning the process slots into existing workflows rather than replacing them. Additional improvements include better AI-written ad copy, multilingual capabilities across image and video formats, and built-in approval tools that reduce the back-and-forth involved in getting campaigns signed off.
Finding and Working With Creators Just Got Simpler
For brands using influencer or creator partnerships, Meta is consolidating its previously separate tools into a single destination called Meta Creator Marketing Hub, due to launch later this year. Rather than switching between platforms to find creators, review content and activate ads, businesses will be able to do all of this from one place, covering both Instagram and Facebook. New discovery features will also surface relevant content from creators you are not yet working with, including product-tagged posts and user-generated content, along with performance data to help you make smarter partnership decisions. For brands that have found creator marketing fragmented and time-consuming to manage, this is a meaningful practical improvement.
Turning Customer Conversations Into Sales Opportunities
Perhaps the most forward-looking announcement is the expansion of Meta’s Business Agent Platform, which allows businesses to deploy AI directly within their customer messaging. Rather than using channels like WhatsApp purely for notifications, brands can now create personalised, conversational shopping experiences at scale. The potential is real: one early adopter reported over 15,000 AI-powered shopping conversations in its first week live in a new market. With over one million businesses already using the platform, this is not a distant possibility but a growing commercial reality. For brands that want to convert everyday customer interactions into revenue, this is worth exploring now rather than later.
