New WhatsApp AI Tools to Help Businesses’ Marketing
Meta is introducing new WhatsApp AI tools to help businesses better target their ads.
- The program uses behavior from the other Meta Platforms.
- It will also create ads to remind you of your cart’s content and give you discounts to empty it.
Meta is launching its first AI-driven ad targeting program for businesses on WhatsApp, focusing on growing WhatsApp’s profits.
Despite quickly approaching three billion unique active users, WhatsApp does not bring in much revenue in comparison to Facebook and Instagram. For years, Meta has tried to profit off the application that it had purchased for an eye-watering $21.8 billion in 2014.
In January 2018, Meta, which was still named Facebook at the time, released another version of WhatsApp that helps small businesses communicate more effectively with their customer bases. And then sometime in 2020, Meta introduced some WhatsApp Business tools and features like pricing tiers for services, charged on a per-message basis. This update allowed small businesses to send marketing material to their customers who have shared their phone numbers with them.
Add a Little AI
Now, Meta is introducing new WhatsApp AI tools to give businesses the possibility to optimize ad delivery to users most likely to engage. The AI will monitor the behavior on Facebook and Instagram, then it will take this data and target the people most likely to be interested in the message. According to the blog post, it will also create ads on those platforms, reminding you that you left an item in your cart.
What about the User?
Add to this update the fact that Meta has been testing unskippable ads on Instagram, and you get a demonstration of how the $1.25 trillion company is prioritizing revenue over their users’ experience and data privacy. Companies want to make money, obviously, but that doesn’t mean they should stop considering what is best for the user.
If things escalate and users get tired of being tied to Meta’s ecosystem, people might go look for alternatives. There might not be social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but WhatsApp is not unique. Off the top of my head, I can name two other messaging apps that also boast encrypted messages: Signal and Telegram. At least those don’t have a vulnerability that allows governments to monitor you.
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