Given AI’s many use cases in digital advertising, it’s easy to overlook one of the most common challenges advertisers face when using AI solutions: scalability.
The reality is that AI alone can only do so much to help your team be more efficient. For real scalability, you need a system to govern your AI and automation to deliver the work that AI generates for you.
Ultimately, automation is a force multiplier for AI. With automation, AI can go from insightful to fully actionable.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- Where AI has the biggest impact in digital advertising and where it falls short
- Why automation is the key to using AI to its fullest potential
- About three critical AdOps workflows where AI and automation can work together for maximum impact for your business
AI is a creative and analytical powerhouse, but it’s difficult to scale
AI’s strengths as a content variation generator and meticulous analytical tool are known far and wide. For advertisers, the ability to identify actionable patterns and trends within complex, unstructured datasets and turn them into impactful strategies is one of AI’s most useful characteristics.
AI is the right tech if you need 50 variations of character-length-specific copy for different ad types or a massive performance dataset analyzed for key takeaways. AI can churn out high volumes of detailed and varied content for your advertising needs.
Blending AI’s content generation and continuous improvement insights capabilities enables you and your team to optimize and improve ROI faster than ever—regardless of channel, account, or campaign. Continuously optimizing campaigns to specific audiences, timely events, or custom triggers means higher engagement and conversion rates.
For example, when used within a holistic Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) that pulls data sources and channels together into one place, AI can provide you with real-time recommendations for budgets, keywords, or other parameters.
Automation’s role in scaling infinite and accurate AI-powered workflows
Automation’s strength is providing very predictable, deterministic outcomes at infinite scale. With automation, you can simultaneously execute core tasks for hundreds (or even thousands) of campaigns, regardless of platform, without any manual work.
Automation is the perfect mechanism for scaling and leveraging the power of AI. It allows you to maximize AI's valuable outputs by scaling and distributing them at scale, without any manual work.
AI’s outputs are only as good as how you mobilize and use them. If there’s no conduit to take your AI outputs and put them into play, what value can AI provide you at scale?
Think about it like this: if AI is the creative chef developing new, exciting recipes, then automation is the reliable sous chef team executing those recipes perfectly for every meal, en masse.
The same concept applies in AdTech. AI can give you a ton of insights and ideas, but it can be a lot to manage if you (as a human) are expected to review real-time AI recommendations and take the correct steps to implement them at scale. For example, instead of manually making keyword adjustments or moving AI-generated ad copy variations to every channel or campaign, you can simply automate these workflows.
AI also runs the risk of producing non-compliant messaging, images, or tone, especially when tasked with generating high volumes of variation. Automation can help with these compliance concerns.
Remember that automation is great at adhering to structured rules. Rule systems can provide automation with the right “guardrails” to understand exactly what you want to see (or what you don’t want to see) across your entire ad portfolio. This is true even if you work with different clients, regional brand elements, or regulatory guidelines. Automation can run quality checks on every AI output at scale, making it uniquely suited to ensure that every AI output is both infinitely repeatable and error-free.
If you want to get the most ROI from your AI investments, you need automation to safely and efficiently apply AI recommendations at scale across all platforms without manual work.
Watch now: using integrated data systems to scale AI-optimized campaigns with automation
Streamlining three core AdOps workflows by combining AI and automation
Let’s look at three core advertising operations workflows where AI’s analyses and recommendations can have a bigger impact when paired with automation.
- Budget management:
- Maximize spend (without overspending) for every account by automatically adjusting daily budgets based on real-time performance metrics.
- AI can identify opportunities to reallocate, increase, or decrease budget for different channels or campaigns to maximize results at the best cost.
- Automation can amplify AI’s budget optimizations across your entire portfolio, ensuring that every account, campaign, and customer paces correctly without under- or overspending.
- Reporting:
- Reduce the time your human teams spend building reports while making the most of AI’s valuable findings.
- AI can analyze massive amounts of data from multiple channels and sources to find the most valuable insights specific to each client, account, or campaign.
- Automated workflows can scale the execution of these reporting tasks for every stakeholder and every account.
- Campaign optimization:
- Automate the implementation of AI-identified messaging, creative, or audience recommendations in real time across every campaign, account, and channel.
- AI can analyze campaign performance in real-time to identify patterns and trends that indicate opportunities to meet specific human-set goals (e.g., improve conversion rates or decrease CPL).
- Automation can implement and execute AI’s recommendations at scale while ensuring compliance with any necessary guidelines or requirements.
Combining AI and automation to scale without stress
Even though automation doesn’t get as much hype as AI, it’s without a doubt the unsung hero that ensures AI’s potential is fully realized within your advertising operations.
Keyword recommendations, bid adjustments, budget reallocations, ad copy or image creation…all of these tasks take up a ton of work for your team, both in terms of time and effort. By integrating AI-powered optimizations into automated workflows, you can perform these —and many other—AdOps tasks for multiple channels in a fraction of the time and with none of the manual work.
Integrating AI’s creative and analytical power with the precision and scalability of automation will help you achieve unparalleled efficiency across your advertising operations. Together, these two technologies are changing the way all advertisers do their work, making it possible to reap better results with less manual work.
