With activation becoming increasingly automated, how do performance marketers stay ahead? In this video, join Performance Director Liam Wade and Paid Media Director Mike Wickham as they reveal how AI is shifting the role of marketers from “doers” to “thinkers,” unlocking new opportunities for growth.
What You’ll Learn:
- The Automation Advantage: Find out how AI-powered tools like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ free up time by handling repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on high-level strategy.
- Reinvesting Your Time: Discover why this newfound time isn’t an “automatic cost saving.” Instead, it’s a valuable resource that should be reinvested into more creative thinking, experimentation, and cross-channel testing.
- Beyond the On/Off Switch: Learn to avoid treating performance marketing like a simple on/off switch. The experts explain how you can still have significant control by feeding AI platforms the right data and making strategic tweaks.
- The Dangers of Efficiency: The video warns against focusing solely on efficiency, which can lead to performance plateaus and a loss of brand differentiation. It highlights the importance of using AI for creative exploration rather than just iteration.
Transcript
Liam Wade: So in this new paid media world, where activation is completely automated, we’ve got AI smart bidding, Performance Max and Advantage+ and things like that. How do you actually win in performance marketing?
Mike Wickham: What those new tools and features do is help you activate quicker, right? So, it unlocks a lot of time, effectively. I think what we’ve got to be careful of is not necessarily just, you know, selling less time or having less time available. I think we need to reinvest that time into more strategic thinking.
Liam Wade: We have new ways to win now. As you say, as you automate with AI, you have more time to focus on strategy. You have more time to focus on the creative aspects. You have more time to focus on feeding these AI platforms the right data. And there’s still so much to gain out there. One of the big worries I have is that in the new AI world, performance marketing is treated like a bit of an on/off switch, like you can turn it off and on, and there’s no real control that you have. But you still have so much control that you can leverage, even within the AI tools. There are tweaks that you can make, such as feeding synthetic data, which we’ve been doing for some of our clients, which can really, really maximise performance.
Mike Wickham: It’s about unlocking more time and more ability to dive into the insight, to actually understand the nuances of performance or what’s driving it. I think quite often one of the challenges that marketers have is that they’re looking at their channel and platform metrics, and there isn’t a good reason for why something is up or down. It’s not within that data. It’s sitting within the externalities; it’s sitting within macro-environment data, or it could be caused by the weather. All of these kinds of things that I think, historically, have been really difficult to diagnose, especially when you’re almost channel-siloed. You’re looking at one platform, but I suppose AI has the ability now to A) give you more time to be able to look wider than that and B) surface those insights a lot faster.
Liam Wade: Some of the elements that you might think of with LLMs are now really easy to automate, such as ad copy. They’ve kind of become the things that you really don’t want to automate as much because they’re the areas where consumers actually see what you’re presenting to them, and they’re the areas where you can differentiate. AI is kind of levelling the playing field, and if you’re adding just a little bit of creativity, you can really stand out. And I’ve been seeing a metric recently, which is Return on Time. So, CMOs internally, rather than looking at how effectively they’re running their marketing, it’s how efficiently they’re running their marketing, which is a very, very different way of looking at things. It’s proven time and time again that if you focus on efficiency and efficiency only, whether it’s through the use of AI or something else, eventually you stop growing because the quality gets lower and lower. How differentiated you are gets lower and lower, and suddenly, you’re a small player in the market and your performance is plateauing.
Mike Wickham: Do you think there’s a risk, because it’s becoming so much easier to churn out this content and you can do it in less time than you used to, that there’s a problem with almost having too much? Trying to put too much out there, almost testing too many variations?
Liam Wade: When you’re using LLMs to experiment, and LLMs are really good at iterating on what’s already happened, they’re not very good at exploration. So you’re very, very seldom coming up with brand new ideas. You’re coming up with tried and tested ideas that have worked for everyone. So yes, there’s a huge danger in that. So we’ve had a good chat. What would you say the biggest takeaways are?
Mike Wickham: Brands and agencies should be embracing AI, ultimately. I think we should be looking at driving efficiencies. I think we should be looking at speeding up the work that we do. But the key thing is, any time saving shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an automatic cost saving. I think you should look at what else you could be doing on top. So, more experimentation, more creativity, more channel testing, and looking at the broader landscape to see what else you could potentially be doing. So, I think that time needs to be reinvested if possible.
