‘AI killed the paid media star’: this is how it is revolutionizing the world of digital marketing
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Artificial intelligence is advancing at a dizzying pace. Omnipresent. It generates rivers of ink on a daily basis and has also revolutionized the world of digital marketing, of course. However, although platforms such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and MeetGeek are relatively recent, digital advertising has been evolving alongside technology for much longer.
For quite a few years now, Google, Facebook and programmatic advertising in general have been using algorithms and machine learning, words that may have been worn out and replaced by the more modern ‘AI’; but with the same purpose of making life easier for advertisers and helping them improve the results of their campaigns, making media investment more efficient.
Google Universal App Campaigns: the revolution in mobile advertising campaigns
About 10 years ago, one of the things that was all the rage was mobile apps, and at that time my focus was on making them more dynamic, especially with mobile advertising campaigns. One of the platforms that emerged at that time was Google Universal App Campaigns, and I remember it as something revolutionary.
It was a type of campaign that combined different Google channels (Search, Google Play, YouTube, Google Display Network, etc.), using automation and machine learning to optimize results. The campaigns were very easy to set up, there was no need to worry too much about keywords and other more arduous aspects of configuring a typical programmatic campaign. It promised to make everything easy and automatic. And it worked like a charm most of the time.
However, I remember cases in which the algorithm decided to allocate more budget to channels that clearly generated worse results than others. It was not something that could be configured manually (in such situations, the automation of such campaigns worked against it) but fortunately there was some room to ‘hack’ the algorithm with some indirect adjustments.
You could say that the technology wasn’t perfect… or maybe it just didn’t work for the advertiser alone (and it also had to ‘feed’ those other channels with worse performance). There’s no way to be sure; the problem with it being a black box is that it’s all a matter of faith.
Creative challenges in campaign optimization
Another interesting element was that, when it came to dealing with advertisements or creative work, the platform made a kind of collage from various elements (headlines, descriptions, images…) and applied a certain machine learning to identify and enhance the elements that offered the best results. For their part, Facebook and other players in the advertising sector also pivoted their advertising platforms to offer similar functionalities, which are now more than commonplace.
However, not everything was so idyllic. Although the promise of these platforms is that their algorithms optimize ad delivery, automatically distributing the budget among the most effective ads and, ultimately, maximizing campaign ROI, the truth is that this was not always (and is not always) the case.
Sometimes, campaigns with automatic bidding can misinterpret certain signals or data, which ends up leading to incorrect (or at least improvable) decisions in the allocation of budgets or in the optimization of campaigns.
The arrival of Google Performance Max
Technology continued to evolve and, in the case of Google, they introduced their famous Performance Max campaigns, already in times of pandemic. Unlike its predecessors (Universal App Campaigns or Smart Bidding), Google Performance Max represented an important evolution, a technological leap forward that deepened automation, present in a more comprehensive way, covering multiple advertising formats and channels.
These improvements meant greater optimization of campaign performance. At least in theory, because, as I mentioned before, we are still dealing with a black box that requires an act of faith. All these automation-based platforms are still fallible and, above all, they continue to have as their main objective maximizing the profit of their creators, not only that of their advertisers.
Another recurring concern that is often mentioned is privacy. And ethics. There is a risk that the way these platforms manage audiences is based on sensitive or discriminatory data, which could lead to unfair advertising practices. In addition, both Google and Meta have come under scrutiny in recent years for anti-competitive practices. In Google’s case, when you are both judge and jury (you sell advertising and also measure it), it is difficult not to arouse suspicion.
Process automation in paid media campaigns
On the other hand, there has always been a very palpable risk that advertisers will become too dependent on ‘the machines’ and lose their edge when it comes to making manual adjustments when necessary. Managing paid media is undoubtedly much more comfortable now than it was a decade ago, as it is not necessary to be ‘tinkering’ with campaigns so frequently (my boss still thinks I’m fiddling with the Facebook Business Manager all day, so I hope he doesn’t read this). Automation is convenient, yes, but it can become a trap if it makes us forget the importance of human judgment and active supervision.
I believe that, despite technological advances, it is still necessary to adapt to the – sometimes sudden – changes of an increasingly dynamic market. Or to make strategic decisions based on our experience and knowledge. And no, the ‘collage’ of creatives that Google or Meta propose does not always work as it should. Launching hundreds of mediocre creatives, based on combinations made by algorithms, does not ensure success.
The marketing professional still has to establish meaningful connections with the target audience, focus strongly on creative innovation and on the human context necessary to fully understand consumer behavior and market subtleties. And the fact is that, bringing the legendary song by The Buggles into my own field, although there are those who claim that “AI killed the paid media star”, digital marketing and advertising professionals have not yet had their last word and continue to have the opportunity to assert their professionalism and expertise to bring perspective to campaigns.
