At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week, Meta announced a slew of even more automated marketing tools, further lowering the barrier to entry for advertisers to manage campaigns directly. Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta’s head of global business group, joins this episode of the Digiday podcast to talk about how that does and doesn&#x27;t change the agency-platform relationship.

Meta courts agencies with expanded ad tools while AI reshapes the industry

The Digiday Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** The Digiday Podcast

## Participants

- **Kamiko McCoy** (Digiday)
- **Nicola Mendelsohn** (Meta)
- **Nicola Mendelsohn** (Meta)

## Transcript

This episode is brought to you by Blockboard. Running high-quality ad campaigns used to mean big teams, big budgets, and a lot of complexity. BlockVantage changes that. AI does the heavy lifting, so you can launch campaigns in minutes, across screens, including TV, with no media buying expertise required. And every impression is verified before you pay. No black boxes, just results that you can trust. Visit MyBlockboard.com.

Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast. I'm your co-host, Kamiko McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digiday, coming to you live from this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in the South of France. We're coming to the end of this year's festival, and if you've made it this far, congratulations.

A lot of this year's conversation has been big beachside announcements and claims about AI, as always, but one thing that's becoming pretty clear is that AI is everywhere, especially in how ads are built, how they're bought, how they're measured, and the growing question around where that leaves the agency role. If you want a full rundown of everything that's been coming out of CanLion International Festival, Digiday's obviously got you covered. We've got a newsletter coming out every day. If you haven't checked it out, please try to do so.

In this episode, I'm talking to Nicola Mendelsohn from Meta. She's head of Global Business Group, and we talked about how Meta is leaning further into automation and AI with this ad business, but they're trying to do so in a way that doesn't necessarily cut out the ad agency or the whole co-roll. So, without further ado. Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much. I'm absolutely delighted to be here with you. What can is this for you?

This is Cannes Lions, I think. 23 years of coming here. 13 with Meta, and before that, it was 20 years plus in advertising. Oh my goodness. So, you've seen a lot change, but I would also imagine that you've seen a lot change within Meta's own ad business, which is what we're here to talk to you about today. A couple of years ago, I was reporting that Apple had privacy changes, and there was the rise of TikTok, and there was all this tumultuation happening.

And the question was, what is Meta going to do now that this space is starting to get crowded? Today, Meta has really solidified itself as an ad business, and it's even her e-marketer on track to surpass Google's ad business. Talk to me a little bit about what's changed. Wow. There's a lot of questions in there, but I think the main thing has changed is the fact that we've been working with AI for the business side well over a decade.

You know, we use the models to service the right content to people that are using our platform. So, the fact that more than 3.5 billion people are uti...

Meta courts agencies with expanded ad tools while AI reshapes the industry

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Meta courts agencies with expanded ad tools while AI reshapes the industry

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.