Automation is eating ad strategy – it’s time to push back
As media buying becomes increasingly automated, marketers are trading control for convenience - and losing visibility in the process.
Michael Dargan, senior account manager at Murmur, explores the hidden cost of over-automation.
In today’s fast-moving media environment, automation is sold as the answer to everything: faster planning, broader reach, cheaper results.
And on the surface, it looks like automation delivers. Ad platforms like Google and Meta have built powerful machine learning engines that promise simplicity, scale and performance – allegedly low effort and high reward. But as automation accelerates, something important is getting lost: control.
We’ve reached a tipping point where convenience is coming at the expense of clarity.
Advertisers are told to “trust the algorithm”, but that trust often obscures what’s really going on beneath the hood – how budgets are spent, where inventory is shown and whether those communications are actually resonating with audiences. Put simply: in the rush to automate, we’ve lost sight of accountability.
Take Google’s Performance Max for example. This solution promises end-to-end efficiency, bundling display, video, email, shopping and search placements into one automated buy. You upload creative assets, set your goals and the system does the rest.
It appears to be an extremely powerful tool that can help get a campaign off the ground with more ease than ever. But, I encourage every marketer to take stock of its capabilities and pitfalls alike.
Michael Dargan
When advertising automation is optimised behind a black box, important questions go unanswered. Which format is driving the highest engagement? How extensively is our brand story being told through digital video. Are we building a brand, or just chasing clicks?
In a recent test for a client we applied a custom script to estimate where Performance Max impressions were actually landing.
The result? Fewer than 3% of impressions were served on YouTube, despite the campaign including dedicated video creative.
The vast majority of campaign spend went to search and display inventory, cannibalising existing campaigns and diluting the impact of the video content entirely.
Automation may be efficient. But if marketers don’t know what they’re buying, how can they be sure it’s working?
There’s no doubt that machine learning can drive value, particularly for performance-focused objectives. But when platforms become too opaque, marketers risk losing the ability to shape how their brands are experienced. Creative context matters. Message and medium need to align. And right now, much of that nuance is being flattened in the name of scale.
There’s also a dangerous assumption baked into many automated tools: that cheap results equal effectiveness. But real effectiveness – the kind that builds brands and drives commercial outcomes – requires more than a low CPM. It requires resonance. And resonance demands thoughtful planning, placement and measurement. That’s not to mention one of the most striking casualties of over-automation – video.
Despite its power to deliver emotion, storytelling and long-term brand equity, video often gets reduced to just another line item in an aggregated media buy. That’s a missed opportunity. Video isn’t in decline – it’s evolving.
Linear TV minutes may be shrinking but audiences haven’t stopped watching. They’ve simply shifted platforms. In fact, platforms like YouTube are now dominating screen time, not just on mobile but on connected TVs in the living room.
We only have to look to the Federal Election to see how true this is.
Google’s own advertising transparency centre found YouTube was the single biggest channel for election spending during this year’s campaign, with a total of $25.9 million spent on video advertising. Yet many marketers don’t realise that placing a video asset in an automated campaign doesn’t guarantee meaningful video delivery.
In most automated systems, video is just one format among many, competing for budget with banners and search ads. Without control, most of that video budget never reaches an actual video environment.
That’s not a creative problem – it’s a planning problem.
So what can marketers do? The first step is to bring transparency back into the planning process. Not all automation is bad but blind automation is.
Ask better questions. Push for format-specific reporting. Use custom scripts and formulae to get visibility on where your ads are running, where platforms are deliberately opaque in pre-built reporting. Don’t settle for averages – demand insights.
Second, reintroduce media strategy into creative development.
Automation has separated planning from storytelling, but the two are fundamentally linked. Know where your creative will show up and shape it accordingly. A video built for a connected TV moment should look and feel different than one destined for an Instagram reel. Finally, stop treating automation as a default. It’s a tool – not a strategy. Use it where it makes sense but don’t let it dictate your approach to brand building.
There’s still immense value in deliberate planning, creative curation and understanding how media environments shape audience perceptions.
Doing more with less is a necessity these days, and automation undoubtedly helps with that – but only when paired with insight, intention and control.
In the end, the goal isn’t just to make things easier. It’s to make them better. And that starts by asking the right questions, choosing the right tools and never losing sight of the story you’re trying to tell. Because if we want advertising to truly perform, we need to stop treating automation as the destination – and start seeing it for what it is: one part of a much, much bigger picture.
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Really insightful piece that challenges brands, agencies, and media owners to think long and hard about sacrificing effectiveness for the sake of efficiency. In the long term both are essential appropriate balance is the key. Campaign KPIs can be set too narrowly and need to be clearly defined and prioritized in any client brief.
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