After you meticulously crafted your social ads to engage your target audience, you notice that there is something different about your ad when seeing it appear on your feed. Whether it be an unexpected headline, added music, or new text, AI is here to “optimize” your ads for engagement. Your precisely crafted campaigns are increasingly considered old hat by the platform, but for B2B marketers, whose campaigns are built around precise positioning, technical accuracy, and long consideration cycles, this “optimization” lands differently than it does for a consumer brand chasing impulse clicks. New AI-driven options are becoming the new norm and default option across many popular social platforms. For example, since 2023, Meta has been slowly rolling out “AI enhancements” on all ads, and today we’re experiencing AI becoming more deeply integrated into our most popular digital ad platforms.
The question for marketers has turned into: “How do you ensure brand integrity is preserved as you integrate AI-driven enhancements?”
As each platform promotes more use of AI for creative, messaging, and targeting decisions, marketers are being asked to trust automated systems with decisions that used to be closely guarded, and to navigate new features with every campaign launch. Typically, B2B marketing requires you to be as credible as possible within your brand’s guidelines, so the range of freedom marketing platforms give these AI tools may surprise you. For example, Google’s Performance Max campaigns use Google’s unused inventory to generate efficient traffic, but some placement options can’t be fully reviewed until the campaign is already live. I mentioned Meta and Google, but other key players, Reddit and TikTok, are all rolling out more robust AI features for their ad products
Google is now promoting new AI-enabled ads and AI Max campaigns, Reddit has its new automated Max campaigns, and TikTok has a fully integrated AI content partner called TikTok Symphony. This is becoming the new standard for these platforms as they invest more in these programs. These campaigns aim to save users the hassle of setup by fully automating copy by pulling from existing content, automating targeting/asset management based on performance, and even going as far as offering an AI agent that provides content ideas and AI-generated assets for your ads. While there’s still space for human oversight, AI literacy is becoming a new skill for marketers as they learn to incorporate these tools into their strategy.
The anxiety among marketers isn’t about job security, but rather about losing the sense of how their campaigns are representing their brands.
While you can feed AI tools, brand kits, guidelines, and campaign ideas, so much of the process is automated that the job itself is taking on a new shape, where we identify which AI options to lean on and which to omit. Expert human review becomes even more important to provide oversight on what AI generates. It’s not all doom and gloom, as there’s merit beyond just the resources saved by using these tools. Platforms are favoring these AI-driven campaigns. Meta, for example, reports over a 22% increase in ROAS (return on ad spend) for advertisers who switch to automated campaigns.
At Grafik, we’re fully engaged with the capabilities of these new AI services and confident in our fluency in using these tools to optimize campaigns for platform algorithms. We have recently expanded into new ChatGPT Ads and Google AI Max options to keep our clients as pioneers and to help them better reach their niche audience by focusing on their Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). This is no longer becoming optional as these campaigns become the new default for your campaigns. We treat staying ahead of this as its own discipline. We stay knowledgeable about new offerings, test new features, and thoroughly review every output on these marketing platforms. Optimistically, we believe ad setup will get faster and cheaper for everyone, so the advantage will shift from who has the resources to build a campaign, to who knows how to manage it well. Ultimately, judgment stays with our strategists’ oversight. We need to remember that AI works for us, not the other way around.