Advertising for Good: The Role of AI in Shaping Responsible Innovation

The most anticipated session at Smartly Advance brought together some of the biggest names in advertising: Alan Moss of Amazon, Judy Toland of Meta, Bill Watkins of Pinterest, Khartoon Weiss of TikTok, Tara Walpert Levy of YouTube, and Laura Desmond of Smartly. Their task was not simply to talk about what AI can do, but what it should do and how responsibility, trust, and creativity must guide its adoption.

No more trade-offs between brand and performance

Alan Moss of Amazon opened with a challenge to marketers: the old belief that they must choose between building brands and delivering performance is breaking down. “The good news,” he said, “is the technology is there to enable both.” For him, AI is a tool to orchestrate campaigns across silos, giving marketers the ability to deliver growth and brand value simultaneously.

Judy Toland of Meta took the point further, emphasizing “clear, responsible leadership” in AI. For her, AI is not just about productivity gains but about creating new opportunities for growth while staying anchored in what works: tried-and-true digital marketing that continues to deliver performance.

Well-being engineered into the algorithm

Bill Watkins of Pinterest reminded the audience that responsibility is not just rhetoric but design choice. Two years ago, Pinterest made under-16 profiles private by default. “Wall Street thought we had shot ourselves in the foot,” he said, but the result has been striking: Gen Z has grown from 38% to 50% of Pinterest’s audience, and the company has seen record user and revenue growth. The lesson: positivity and commercial success are not at odds if they are engineered into the platform.

Khartoon Weiss of TikTok underscored this point with a single word: trust. For a platform that skews young and moves at cultural speed, earning trust through responsible AI guidelines, community designations, and safety systems is paramount. “Trust is the number one thing TikTok has had to earn for years and will continue to do,” she said.

AI as a creative accelerator

Tara Walpert Levy of YouTube reframed the conversation around creativity. AI, she argued, is not about replacing human imagination but amplifying it. YouTube’s newest tools, from AI-powered dubbing and video editing to creative studio assistants, are designed to “take friction out of the process” so creators and brands can focus on ideas, not manual edits. “AI is to amplify and extend the creativity of humans,” she said, a philosophy that positions YouTube as a partner rather than a substitute for creators.

Alan Moss returned to underline how Amazon is thinking about scale in practice. The company announced its new agentic AI tool in Creative Studio, designed to ingest brand suitability guidelines and sit atop trillions of shopping signals. The result is creative that is both consistent with brand identity and deeply relevant to consumers. For holiday campaigns in particular, Moss argued, AI eliminates the need for trade-offs between which products to promote, enabling hyper-customization at speed.

Democratizing creativity

Judy Toland highlighted Meta’s $100 billion+ investment in AI infrastructure, including tools like Advantage+ and Reels Trending Ads. The focus is on democratization - giving small businesses, nonprofits, and grassroots organizations the same creative horsepower as global brands. She cited a Men’s Wearhouse example where AI-driven segmentation and creative generation collapsed months of work into hours, allowing the brand to deliver targeted content across buyer personas with unprecedented speed.

Meta’s emphasis, Toland said, is on ensuring that AI extends access and opportunity while delivering measurable uplift: “Our advertisers are already seeing lower costs to reach qualified leads and higher engagement from new creative tools.”

Trust, responsibility, and volume

Khartoon Weiss expanded on TikTok’s philosophy: volume is the natural behavior of today’s audiences. People are consuming more, in shorter bursts, and TikTok’s role is to give brands and agencies the tools to keep pace responsibly. She cited the launch of TikTok’s content suite, which enables vetted UGC to be turned into ads at speed, sparking what she called “content into commerce.” For Weiss, the balance lies in accelerating creativity without automating it away, while maintaining rigorous moderation and labeling practices.

Confidence in discovery and decision-making

Bill Watkins explained Pinterest’s dual focus on discovery and decision-making. With over 500 million objects organized into 10 billion collections, Pinterest’s AI powers hyper-relevant visual search and predictive trends. He cited a moment when Pinterest spotted an engagement trend months before it broke into mainstream headlines, illustrating AI’s role in shaping cultural anticipation. On the commerce side, AI-powered decisioning tools like collages and shopping lists are designed to give consumers confidence in their choices and advertisers confidence that their campaigns align with real intent.

Doing good and driving growth

When asked about the broader role of advertising, panelists rejected the notion that responsibility and profit are mutually exclusive. Alan Moss pointed to AI-driven drones delivering healthcare supplies to remote areas, alongside Amazon’s Rufus assistant making shopping more personalized and efficient. Tara Walpert Levy referenced YouTube’s role in creator-led campaigns like Team Water, which raised $40 million for global causes in just 30 days.

For Pinterest, the lesson is clear: “There’s not a trade-off between engineering for positivity and being a thriving business,” Watkins said. And for Meta, Judy Toland added, the impact is already visible: $8 billion raised through Facebook and Instagram for nonprofits, powered increasingly by generative AI.

Why this matters

Laura Desmond closed the session with a reminder: AI’s role in advertising is not only about efficiency, but about extending creativity, trust, and joy in the work itself. The consensus across Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok was that AI must be designed with responsibility baked in to create not just better business outcomes, but better societies.

The heaviest hitters in the industry are no longer asking whether AI will shape advertising. They are asking how to shape it responsibly and in doing so, they are setting the tone for the next decade.

SPONSORED BY