Meta’s AI-powered Movie Gen may be adopted by marketers, but transparency concerns remain

While the tool has yet to be generally released to the public, marketing experts are already optimistic about its potential for their industry.

“Meta’s Movie Gen is probably going to be a game-changer for both in-house and agency creative teams, empowering them to push the boundaries of experimentation and dynamically personalize customer experiences,” says Paul Rakotoarisoa, VP of analytics and decision intelligence practice lead at digital consulting firm Hero Digital. “It’ll enhance creative capabilities, allowing teams to innovate and iterate rapidly while maintaining the unique creative vision that defines their brand.”

In a blog post, Meta suggested a few ideas for how the tool might be used across its family of apps: “Imagine animating a ‘day in the life’ video to share on Reels and editing it using text prompts, or creating a customized animated birthday greeting for a friend and sending it to them on WhatsApp. With creativity and self-expression taking charge, the possibilities are infinite.”

One might easily imagine brands taking advantage of the new program.

Sample images provided by the company show an accompanying disclosure label reading, “Imagined with AI.”

The news is a signal of Meta’s growing ambition to compete with other big tech players, including Adobe and OpenAI, which have unveiled their own text-to-video models. And with the recently announced partnership between AI startup Runway and Lionsgate, the technology is now increasingly infiltrating the entertainment sector.

While Meta isn’t positioning its new video generation and editing tool to marketers explicitly, this demographic could be quick to embrace it, given the company’s outsized presence in the marketing and advertising industry.

“What makes this truly significant is what’s behind it: it’s the first such model backed by a company with an unparalleled advertising infrastructure – we’re talking about a company with a massive ad machine,” says Alex Persky-Stern, CEO of Waymark, a startup specializing in AI-generated video. “This is an early development but an important one. It signals a shift in how AI might be specifically tailored for advertising applications, potentially changing the game for ad creation and optimization. We’re beginning what could be a transformative journey for our industry.”

Others, however, are skeptical about using AI-generated video for any brand-related campaigns – and Meta’s Movie Gen is no exception. A key concern is transparency in how the program is trained.

Meta, which has been conspicuously loud about its commitment to open-sourcing its AI systems, has been notably mum about the content used to train Movie Gen: the company’s announcement only said that the new models were trained “on a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets.”

This opacity, in the view of some marketers, will impact adoption of the tool among marketers – many of whom would like greater transparency into the training data. “These technologies are a step in the right direction for the industry… but there remains too much of a gray area in how these models ingest and learn from the data that is input into them,” says Rylee Strachan, vice-president of digital strategy at Publicis Canada. “Many of our brands aren’t comfortable allowing these models to learn from their brand assets, talent or IP … resulting in limited use-cases for their real-time application. Put simply: it’s great, but we still can’t use it the way we want to.”

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