Meta has announced new AI creative tools, a unified creator marketing hub, and an expanded business agent at Cannes Lions 2026.
Meta used its presence at Cannes Lions 2026 to announce a significant expansion of its AI advertising capabilities, with a particular focus on making advanced tools accessible to smaller advertisers and businesses without dedicated technical or creative teams.
The most significant announcement for small business advertisers is a new end-to-end creative solution that Meta says will make AI-enabled ad creation accessible to every marketer, not just those with technical ad buying expertise.
The centrepiece is a feature called brand memory. The tool learns a brand’s identity and tone from its existing ads and uses those insights when generating new creative, allowing businesses to scale ad production without losing consistency in how their brand looks and sounds. For small businesses that have struggled to maintain brand consistency when producing large volumes of ad variations, the feature addresses a genuine practical problem.
The solution also includes a shared space for creative and media teams to see which ads are performing, generate new ones based on what is working, and test them before broader rollout. Meta says this closes the loop between performance data and creative decisions in real time.
Additional updates to existing Ads Manager tools include expanded text generation that now covers text appearing directly in image creative, not just headlines and primary text. Language translation capabilities are also being expanded significantly, adding Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Indonesian to text on media, and a broader range of languages including Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Dutch and Turkish to video voiceover. For small businesses with customers across multiple markets, the translation expansion reduces the cost and time involved in producing localised ad creative.
A built-in creative approval workflow is also being tested, allowing advertisers to get feedback and alignment on creative changes within Ads Manager rather than through separate communication channels.
It is worth noting that Meta’s claim of $4.13 in revenue for every dollar spent on Meta ads comes from a large-scale study run on Meta’s own platforms across more than one million ad campaigns in April 2026. The study was conducted using a framework developed by academics at the University of California at Berkeley, but the data comes from Meta’s platforms and the finding should be considered in that context.
Creator partnerships in one place
Meta is consolidating its two creator marketing tools, Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub, into a single destination called Meta Creator Marketing Hub, launching later this year.
The unified hub will also expand to include Facebook creators for the first time. More than five million Instagram creators are already discoverable in Creator Marketplace. Adding Facebook creators gives businesses a single destination to find and connect with creators across both platforms, which is practically useful for small businesses that have previously had to manage these relationships across separate tools.
The hub is also being updated to surface content from creators a business does not already work with, including product-tagged and user-generated posts, and to allow filtering by content that has product tags. New pre-permissioned content from creators who have opted in to have their content run as an ad is also being introduced, shortening the path from finding relevant creator content to activating it as a paid campaign.
AI that talks to your customers
Meta’s Business Agent, which the company says is already used by more than one million businesses, is being expanded with new capabilities for handling customer conversations across Meta’s messaging apps.
The agent is designed to turn customer messages into conversion opportunities, handling inquiries, providing recommendations, and supporting sales interactions within WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram Direct. Kutay Konakci, Head of Growth at Trendyol Group, described the impact of using Meta Business Agent in a new market. “We had millions of customers already on WhatsApp, but we were only using it as a notification channel. With Meta Business Agent, we’ve transformed that touchpoint into a personalized shopping experience. In our first week live in Saudi Arabia, we saw over 15,000 AI-powered shopping conversations.”
For small businesses managing customer inquiries manually, the agent offers a way to handle volume without adding headcount, though the quality and appropriateness of AI-handled customer conversations will depend heavily on how well the agent is configured for each business’s specific context.
What this means for small businesses
Several of the announced tools are still in testing and not yet broadly available. The end-to-end creative solution, brand memory, and the unified creator hub are all flagged as rolling out in the coming months rather than immediately accessible.
For small business owners currently running Meta ads, the practical near-term actions are limited to monitoring when these tools become available in your Ads Manager, reviewing whether the expanded language translation capabilities are relevant to your markets, and considering whether creator partnerships, now easier to activate through the unified hub, could be a cost-effective channel for your product or service.
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