Advertising Week gave us two announcements in two days. TikTok unveiled agentic advertising features on 5 October. Meta answered on 6 October.
Meta’s version is the one worth paying attention to. Its business assistant can now generate creative, adjust targeting and move budget between campaigns, all from a chat prompt. You type “push more spend to the ads that are converting in Lagos” and it does it.
For a small business owner in Ibadan running her own ads between customer calls, this could be a gift. Most SMEs on the continent can’t afford an agency, and Ads Manager has always been a maze. If a chat box can get her results without a two week course, she’ll use it.
For agencies the picture is less comfortable. A lot of billable hours in African agencies go to exactly the work these tools now automate: resizing creative, tweaking audiences, shifting budget at 11pm. That work is going away. The value left is strategy, local insight and creative that actually understands the audience. Machines are still poor at knowing why a Naija Pidgin line lands in Port Harcourt and falls flat in Nairobi.
There’s also a trust question. When the platform that sells you the ads is also the assistant deciding how much to spend, its interests and yours aren’t always the same. Set hard budget caps. Check what the assistant changed every week. Keep a human signing off anything above a spending limit you’re comfortable losing.
Meta also now lets brands turn opted in creator posts into paid ads, and TikTok launched The Next Episode, a programme for creator led series like micro dramas and docuseries. Both are good news for African creators, who have been producing this kind of content for years with little support.
Sources: Music Ally, Social Lady
