Artificial Intelligence | Meta

June 05, 2023

Written by Taylor Hart

Why Meta’s Lattice Architecture Matters

Meta continues to demonstrate resilience. In 2022, the company took at $10 billion hit to its bottom after Apple’s privacy controls diminished Meta’s ability to target users with advertising that relies on third-party cookies. Since then, Meta has been developing better ad products that help the company develop targeted ads via first-party data, or the information that customers share with Meta on its apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta recently announced a potential breakthrough with Meta Lattice, which uses AI to improve ad targeting.

What Is Meta Lattice?

Meta Lattice is a new model architecture developed by Meta AI that improves the performance and efficiency of Meta’s ads systems. Meta Lattice is a high-capacity architecture that allows the ads system to understand new concepts and relationships more broadly and deeply in data. Meta says this benefits advertisers through joint optimization of a large number of goals.

Meta Lattice is also capable of generalizing its learnings across domains and objectives. This means that it can be used to improve the performance of ads across a variety of apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta also says that Lattice can be used to improve the performance of ads even as the way people use Meta’s products changes.

The Potential Impact of Meta Lattice

Here’s a good before/after way to demonstrate the impact of Lattice.

Before: Meta had segmented advertising data. Meta maintained distinct datasets for ads presented in feeds, stories, Facebook and Instagram video reels, and other formats. This was also true for objectives, as ads targeting conversion, traffic, and video views were kept separate.

Soon: Meta will unify all this information using AI. With Meta Lattice, the platform will decipher patterns that result in enhanced ad performance across various ad formats, objectives, and types. This unification presents Meta’s machine learning algorithms with a larger dataset for learning. According to Meta, this implies better predictions for identifying the most suitable audience for your advertisements, resulting in more conversions through your Facebook Ads Manager — if Lattice does its job.

Meta Lattice is still under development, but it has already shown results. Meta says that in one test, Lattice was able to improve the click-through rate of ads by 10 percent. Meta Lattice is expected to be used to improve the performance of Meta’s ads systems in the future.

Potential Benefits

Here are some of the potential benefits of Meta Lattice:

Improved performance: Meta Lattice is able to improve the performance of ads by understanding new concepts and relationships in data.

Improved efficiency: Meta Lattice is able to generalize its learnings across domains and objectives, which makes it more efficient to use.

Faster adaptability: Meta Lattice is able to adapt to the fast-evolving market landscape, which makes it more effective at delivering relevant ads to users.

It is important that advertisers understand how Meta is developing new ad products. For instance Meta’s Advantage+ ads provide performance marketers advancing ad targeting tools.

As these AI-based platforms evolve, they may become more significant drivers of response, which could help you target the right audience for your offerings without needing to manually set the parameters of each campaign. However, we caution against any advertiser turning over the keys to AI. Advertising campaigns require human supervision to ensure that they continue to meet your objectives. AI advertising tools require human oversight to ensure that its output is accurate, free of bias, and consistent with your brand voice, among other needs.