Meta vs. the World: Weathering Tariffs, AI Wars, and a Potential Plan to Upend the Entire Ad Ecosystem | Behind the Numbers
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Hey gang, it's Monday, May 12th. Minda, Jasmine and listeners, welcome to the E-Marketer podcast made possible by Rocked. It's called Behind the Numbers. I'm Marcus. Today we'll be discussing Meta's resiliency to a tariff climate. Is that a sentence?

This is a rough start. What's happening with its antitrust trial? And if OpenAI could dethrone them with a reported social app of its own? Join me for this conversation. We have two people, two of our social media savants, if you will. Senior analyst based in New York, it's Minda Smiley. Hey, Marcus. How are you? Hello there. Not great, if I'm honest. I was fine before we started recording and we've got off to a hideous start. But thank you for asking. How are you?

I'm doing well. It's very rainy in New York. You might have to carry this episode. I'll try. Along with Jasmine. Jasmine Emberg, VP and Principal Analyst on the other side of America in California. Hello. Hi, Marcus. Hi, everyone. And apologies in advance. I'm a little under the weather, so my voice might be a little shaky today. We're counting on you. What the hell? All right. Listeners, this is not going to be a good one. Are they ever? Anyway, today's fact. Minda...

Finland's national... Yes, right, Jasmine. I've got one for you. Finland's national sport, Minda. Don't say it, Jasmine. Is what? Tennis. No. Why did you say that so confidently? Because she was just talking about tennis. Oh, okay. That's how we started it. So I assumed tennis. Given our conversation. Yeah, context, Marcus. All right. I'm so sorry. No. Do you want another stab at it? No. I'll guess squash. I...

No. So many rackets. No. I don't know. It's not hockey. What? Am I wrong? Don't do this. Claim she's Finnish.

been caught out. What is it? And who put this together? Where is this information coming from? It's coming from me. So who knows if this is true? But yeah, hockey, you'd think hockey because they have the third most Olympic medals of any country. So you'd be like, of course it's hockey. However, their national sport is called Pesopalo. Did I get that right? Oh yeah,

How was the pronunciation? It was pretty good. Thank you. What is it? It's baseball, basically. Oh, okay. Though I'll explain. Jasmine has no idea, apparently. Clearly, I do not. Have you seen this? Have you seen it played, though, Jasmine? I actually haven't. The only sport I really follow is ice hockey, and then I play tennis, but... You've heard of it, though. I've already established that's not a Finnish sport. Okay.

But you have heard of this sport? Yes, of course. Okay. So a game was invented by Laurie Taco Pinkcaller, who visited the US in the early 1900s and went to a baseball game, which he liked, but not everything. So he changed some things. So for instance, it's basically baseball, but the pitcher stands next to the batter and throws the ball up in the air for them to hit and then immediately becomes the catcher. So they kind of have a dual role. It's very strange. And...

diving for bases is amazing. They look, it's like watching Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Their back legs like fly up. It's very entertaining. Did you watch some of it? Maybe. This was most of my weekends. And you have engaged more with this sport than I ever have. I can't believe you don't. I'm just very glad that you did not say hobby horsing.

You can hand in your passport, please. Just send it to me. I'll make sure the proper authorities get it. That is a weirdly popular sport. Hobby horsing? What is hobby horsing? That's made up. So it's like a horse's head, like a stuffed animal horse's head on a stick. And then you kind of just pretend like you're riding a horse and people compete. Isn't that Quidditch?

Wow, that is weirder than I even thought. It's odd. And yeah, sometimes I'm ashamed to admit that that's something that people do in the country. We love you in spite of these things. There's more left to do. We have to come up with interesting, exciting things to do. Today's real topic. What Meta is really trying to build and how antitrust claims could derail that.

All right, folks. Meta made $42 billion during January, February, and March. That's good enough for 16% growth year on year. Not bad. And good enough for them to have adopted an optimistic tone as the tariff situation plays out. Mike Isaac and Eli Tan of the New York Times noted that Meta says it anticipates continued growth in advertising despite tariffs. And that's good enough for them to have adopted an optimistic tone as the tariff situation plays out.

Minda, should Meta be able to weather this tariff climate relatively unscathed? Yeah, I think even before their earnings, this is something Jasmine and I had talked about. Yes, I think it's, of course, the tariff situation is evolving every day. It's hard to really say how, you know, one, three, five months from now, what things are going to look like. But I think at the moment, Minda,

Meta likely will actually benefit from a lot of the tariff activity in that advertisers often will want to consolidate their ad spend into platforms like Meta, like YouTube, you know, like bigger platforms that are proven, that are sophisticated in times of uncertainty. So their earnings guidance and what they said isn't actually that surprising, in my opinion, in terms of, you know, feeling pretty confident that they're going to weather the storm. Yeah. Yeah.

Go on, Jasmine. Yeah, I was just going to say that I've actually been pushing back somewhat against the narrative that Meta is too reliant on Chinese advertisers for quite some time. There's actually a clip of me on Bloomberg in January 2024 that I just pulled up as I was prepping for this podcast where I was arguing that the biggest threat to Meta's business is not Chinese advertisers, but rather regulation. And I'm sure we'll talk about that a little later on. But to Minda's point, that isn't to say that Meta is immunocompromised.

immune to tariffs or a slowdown from China, right? In fact, what Meta is actually heavily exposed to a pullback from Timu, Sheehan and other e-commerce advertisers. And they pointed to that in their earnings, talking about how they'd already seen some reduced spend. But it has such a strong base of domestic and other international advertisers. And it's an essential part of advertising playbooks.

And so I think longer term, as we're entering this period of economic uncertainty and volatility, it'll probably be able to offset some of those losses as advertisers are turning to tried and true platforms that offer them scale and

consistent ROI. And just looking at the blowout earnings for Q1 2025, they've clearly continued to build on the effectiveness and efficiency of their ad platform, which is going to make it even more valuable to advertisers.

Yeah, exactly. And just to kind of jump off of that, too, I know we're going to talk about meta and AI, but that's the thing is like they're really growing a lot, quite a bit right now because of their investments in AI and how that's helping their algorithms and their advertising platform. So that will likely offset a lot of the uncertainty we're going to see in the coming year. Yeah.

And that, I mean, that seems like it's not going to slow down either because uncertain climate you would think would lead to an investment slowdown. But the New York Times piece I was reading for this, one of them was noting that, yeah, tariffs could affect spending on AI data centers because the raw materials that

you use for those data centers have been hammered by Mr. Trump's import taxes. However, Meta doesn't seem to have noticed because they expect to increase spend on data centers by about 9% more than they originally planned to. Their overall expenses will drop a bit, but then not what they're spending on those data centers they need for AI. Jasmine, to your point about

this idea that they're so reliant on some of these Asian retailers or retail giants for ad dollars. It's interesting because it's a fair slice, but it's only 10%. So 10% is not nothing, but Sheehan and Timu...

Only you could say account for 10% of their ad revenue in 2023 and roughly that in 2024 as well. And to what you were saying earlier, they have reduced their ad spend a bit in anticipation of the tariffs. But even if you take away that 10%, you still have a lot left.

Yeah, and I like to break it down this way. If you think about the immediate impact of the tariffs, it's Meta and TikTok that are most exposed, right? Because they do have that wide base of China-based advertisers. Xi'an and Timu are a very good example. But if you think about the longer term impact of tariffs, which is economic uncertainty and volatility,

that actually puts smaller platforms like Snap at a disadvantage. And they're going to be the ones that are going to struggle the most in that environment. Because again, when, you know, budgets are tight, advertisers are first going to start cutting more experimental platforms, less essential platforms, and turning to the bigger ones like Meta that, again, you know, are effective, efficient, and can, you know,

be used at scale. Yeah. Yeah. So Minda, our Marisa Jones was noting, speaking about Snap, that they reported mixed earnings that sparked concern over how smaller social platforms to what Jasmine is saying, or whether the economic uncertainty, it saw noticeable revenue growth up 14% year on year.

But the company pulled its Q2 guidance and lost 1 million users in North America. So, Minda, are you more glass half full or empty following Snap's recent earnings call?

Yeah, I don't know if I'm viewing it in a glass half full half empty, you know, way. But I see what you're saying. I the thing I've been saying is like, I think snap had a great q1. But it kind of happened in a silo. I mean, I think q1 already feels like it was 10 million years ago. I mean, like what? Yeah, they had they had a good quarter in terms of Yeah, they had revenue growth and whatnot. But they're operating in a very different environment now. And yeah, platforms like Snapchat are going to are

are going to lose out in times like this. I've already talked to a few marketers that have said, yeah, we're already pulling back on Snapchat, like actively. So it's a very real thing for them on top of the fact that, yeah, they are dealing with some more kind of existential issues. They did see their North American user base go down a little bit last quarter.

only by a million, but again, it kind of points to the fact that they have saturated their biggest market. That's going to present some long-term issues for them. So they had a great quarter, but I think they're facing a rocky year ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all things considered,

it had an amazing quarter and had there not been the backdrop of the tariffs and the economic uncertainty, I think we would have seen an entirely different reaction to the numbers that they reported. The one thing I will say in Snap's favor though, which stood out to me is that they're very responsive

to issues that arise, right? And if you think about, for example, the fact that their daily active users dropped in North America last quarter, which is not a great sign for engagement on the platform, a lot of that probably had to do with that app redesign that they were rolling out. And they've since paused that or stopped that, understanding that, you know, these

that could be causing some issues with engagement and ultimately within their ad business. Now, that kind of responsiveness, I think, bodes well, meaning that they're definitely working hard to mitigate a lot of the issues. But it is an uphill battle for them, right? I mean, they're, again, not an essential player for a lot of advertisers. And to Minda's point, it's one of the places where

advertisers are already thinking about cutting. The good news, though, and I've been saying this, is that, you know, social is one of the places that will be first hit again by the tariffs, by economic uncertainty, because those ads are really easy to turn off, especially when compared to other channels where you have longer term commitments. But that means that they're also really easy to turn back on. Yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point.

Exactly. And I mean, Snap's been through these situations before and it always seems to come out on the other side. I mean, I know through COVID, through privacy changes, it's had a lot of challenges over the past few years as one of the smaller, more experimental platforms. And then it did have a great quarter last quarter. So I think with Snap, yeah, there are certainly some bright spots for them, even amidst all the instability. Yeah. And I guess this decline, it's not the biggest news in the world because they've been stuck at about 100 million for decades.

I don't know, years now. So it's ticked down a little bit, but it's basically flat and has been flat for a long time. Yeah. And their monthly active user growth. I mean, that was really impressive. And Snapchat plus growth was also incredibly impressive if we're talking about some of the more of some of the other bright spots in its earnings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just the number we talk about in North America has went down a bit, but a lot of other positive notes. Minda, sorry.

Oh, no, I was just going to say, I feel like people kind of gloss over their subscription business a lot, which makes sense. I mean, it's still not like a big portion of their revenue, but it is growing and they really are one of the only social platforms that have kind of been able to make this model work in any real way. So it's something I'm definitely keeping an eye on in the long term for them.

So Snap pulled its Q2 guidance. Meta, however, said that they're expecting revenue growth in the range of 11% to 19% for Q2. For context, that would be compared to 22% that they saw last Q2. So decent, all things considered. One thing that came up there in...

the recent earnings call was this quote by Mr. Zuckerberg. So editor-in-chief of The Verge, Neelay Patel, wrote Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, sat down with Stratechery's Ben Thompson and basically said his plan was to more or less eliminate the entire advertising ecosystem from creative on down. Meta's founder said...

we're going to get to a point where you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect your bank account and you don't need any creative. You don't need any targeting demographic. You don't need a measurement. You can just read the results that we spit out. I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising. Mr. Patel is basically saying, well, Mark is,

Describing here is a vision where a client comes to Meta and says, I want customers for my products. And Meta does everything else using AI. Generates the photos and videos for those products, writes the copy, assembles that into infinite ads, targets those ads to all the people on its platforms, measures which ads perform best, and iterates on them. And then those customers buy actual products on its platforms using a system. So it does everything. Jasmine, your reaction to this future that Meta is imagining?

I mean, it is a very bold and telling interview. I mean, in short, what Zuckerberg is saying is that Meta is better at advertising than advertisers are and that they should just hand over more control to Meta. And that is going to raise a lot of eyebrows if it hasn't already, mine included.

Meta already commands close to three quarters of all social ad spend in the US. And this future that Zuckerberg is laying out could ultimately result in less choice and potentially also more risk for advertisers. And I imagine that there are some, especially SMBs, that will love the increase in efficiency, right, that Meta could provide. But if you think about big brands, they're not really going to want to give up

so much control, especially around creative. They want to know how their budgets are being spent. They want to know how their messaging is being adapted across these platforms. But I think my overall takeaway is, again, given the scale and the importance of meta, when Zuckerberg comes out and says something like this, we have to take it seriously. And if he's envisioning a future that's in

I think advertisers should prepare to see more steps in that direction from Meta, but also from other social platforms. Yeah, this does. I mean, saying that we want to take over the entire advertising ecosystem, probably not the best thing to say during in the midst of an antitrust monopoly trial.

But that's what he's done. Meta undergoing a months-long antitrust trial over whether it illegally quashed competition in social networking by buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they were just young upstarts, New York Times was noting. FTC, Federal Trade Commission lawyer Daniel Matheson saying, Meta decided the competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them.

Close quote. He signed, said, 2012 is the year. Memo from Mr. Zuckerberg stressing the importance of, quote unquote, neutralizing Instagram, calling the message a smear.

Minda, what happens if Meta has to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp, which are potential...

remedies that could be on the table down the road? Yeah, I mean, it would be a massive hit to their business. According to our numbers this year, in the US at least, Instagram actually now brings in more ad spend than Facebook. So I mean, it's kind of become its flagship product in many ways. And so it would definitely be a hit to their business if they were to lose Instagram, if they were to lose WhatsApp as well, which is not as big in the US, but it's much bigger globally. So it would really transform their entire business.

They would lose significant revenue streams. I mean, it would be it would pretty much be a completely different different company. Yeah. Yeah. Jasmine, to what Minda is saying, 2015, so a few years after they bought Instagram, Instagram accounted for 7% of Meta's overall money. Now over half, as Minda was just saying, what would you make of Meta having to potentially sell Instagram and WhatsApp?

One of the questions that's being raised throughout this trial too is what would have happened to Instagram had Meta or back then Facebook not purchased it? And it's impossible to really be able to lay out the scenario. It's hypothetical, right? Yeah, it's counterfactual, exactly.

And, you know, the government has been arguing, you know, along with some comments from Instagram's founders that Facebook tried to stifle some of Instagram's growth. That may be true. It probably is to at least some extent. But regardless of that, to Minda's point and to your point, Marcus, I mean, Instagram really has grown into a powerhouse under Meta's leadership.

I think the other question that I've been thinking a lot about in terms of Meta's trial is the way that the government has been defining the market in which Meta operates. It has only, I believe it's only two competitors and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's Snapchat and MeWe. And it's this personal social networking market that they've, you know,

put forth. And of course, they need to define it as narrowly as possible. But I find it very hard to argue that those are the only two competitors to Meta, especially right now. I mean, I think one of the most telling moments, and I think it was one of Meta's lawyers who said something along the lines of, Your Honor, what is MeWe? Which I think is a question that we were all...

asking. And so there's a lot that remains to be seen in terms of how it plays out.

But if Meta was to lose Instagram and to lose WhatsApp, like Minda said, it would be a devastating blow to its business. It would make it very hard for Meta to continue growing. Instagram is the biggest source of both user growth and revenue growth for the company. WhatsApp, of course, doesn't generate as much revenue, but it does provide Meta with very wide reach.

particularly outside of the US and some data that it can use to support its ad business. And now, you know, as it's focusing more on business messaging on those platforms and integrating AI into that, that's also becoming a more important part of its business. And it really does need WhatsApp to continue that rollout. Yeah. Yeah. Still about 70 million people using it in America.

only 20% of the country. Millions and millions of people, exactly. We were just talking before, Jasmine, you were saying that Meta might see, I don't know if the writing on the wall is the right way of phrasing this because this case could go either way, but kind of planning for the future with the launch of its new standalone AI app, Rivaling Chat GPT. Kimberly Keogh of The Journal was writing about this, saying the AI assistant called Meta AI would

which has 1 billion users, used to be only available within Meta's various platforms, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, but now a standalone app. It has Discover Feed, where users can share and explore how others use AI. It personalizes responses and tailors them to the content and information already shared by its existing users on its other social media sites. It said the app is designed around voice conversations, but doesn't currently have access to the web or real-time information. Meta apparently planning a premium tier application.

and ads for the AI app as well. So Jasmine, what kind of an impact will this standalone AI app from Meta have? - Well, I think they were gonna launch a standalone AI app regardless of what happens in this trial. I do think though, in the context of the antitrust trial, this does provide Meta with another surface, another app that it could monetize should it become more difficult or impossible to generate revenue from its other apps.

I mean, I think it's very, very early days for Meta AI. Of course, you just mentioned that they're planning on introducing paid subscription tiers. I expect at some point there will also be advertising, though Meta has said that it's not coming this year. It would be early, but you never know. Crazier things have happened. But I think there is a real...

urgency from Meta to continue to diversify its platforms and its surfaces so it can continue to grow. And a lot of that urgency, of course, has come from the context of the antitrust trial that it's currently in. Yeah.

Anytime someone says we're not working on advertising, probably going to be ads soon. Minda, let's end with this. So as Meta moves in on ChatGPT's territory, its parent, OpenAI, is moving in on Meta's by building its own X-like social network. Apparently, Kylie Robinson and Alex Heath of The Verge explained that reportedly there's an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT's image generation that has a social feed.

We don't know yet if OpenAI's plan is to release the social network as a separate app or to integrate it into ChatGPT, which did become the most downloaded app globally recently. How concerned, Minda, should the social media world be?

Yeah, it's a great question because I was actually just thinking, I do think one issue meta will have with the standalone app is I think a lot of people will be hesitant to download this app or even want to download this app. I think a lot of people probably don't think as much about it as we all do, but I do think

significant portion of the population are already kind of, you know, feels like, okay, we have Instagram, we have Facebook, we have WhatsApp, meta's in the news all the time. Like, I don't think people necessarily want to download another meta-related app. People have also voiced frustrations. Or another app in general. Or, yeah, or another app in general, let alone another meta app. So I

I don't really, I don't know. I'm interested to see how they try to get people to even download this app, especially at a time when people like they know that meta collects so much of their data. Do they now want to have their metadata now in like an AI driven app? I could see that really kind of skeeving a lot of people out. So,

I don't know. I actually think in a way ChatGBT kind of has a leg up here. I think Meta's probably pretty worried about it. What do you think, Jasmine? I mean, I would agree with you. I think you're spot on. I think people already have so many different choices and options that it's going to be a hard sell to get them to download another app.

But what was really interesting is that Meta is following some of the same strategy that it used to get people onboarded onto threads. I keep getting notifications in my Instagram app that so-and-so creator has joined Meta AI and then a call to action to join them on the app. And so they do already have this built-in potential audience.

that they can tap into. And one of the things I was reading about is that even prior to the launch of Meta AI, they had reached out to many of these creators to provide feedback, also to make sure that the app wasn't devoid of content and just to generate excitement and engagement around it. So I think, again, it's going to be tough.

But Threads has grown into a pretty thriving app, all things considered. And I could see a world in which Meta AI is able to bring in a significant number of users. I think what's really interesting is to look at some of the reasons why they're doing this. I mean, one is there's a limited amount of data out there to train their models. A social network is one that provides

you know, more first-party data for OpenAI and for other platforms. We saw X and XAI merge, right? And a lot of that will just benefit the models that they have. But also, you know, you want to continue to increase engagement and use cases and opportunities

to monetize and social media really does provide a lot of that. And I think we are going to eventually get to a world where AI generated content and AI characters are going to be a more common part of our social media experience. So I'm not

counting either of them out honestly yeah well that's what we've got time for for today's episode thank you so much to my guests for hanging out with me today thank you to Minda thank you indeed thank you to Jasmine thanks for having me of course of course thanks to the whole editing crew Victoria John Lance and Danny Stuart runs the team and Sophie does our social media thanks to everyone for listening in to Behind the Numbers an e-marketer video podcast made possible by Rocked

Make sure you subscribe and follow if you can and leave a rating review if you have a moment. We really, really appreciate it. Sarah will be here Wednesday for the Reimagining Retail Show where she'll be talking all about the attack of the private labels.