Why Digital Marketing Agencies Will Be as Important as Ever in the AI World

If you’re in any tech-related field, you’ve likely lived through more AI hype cycles than you care to count. But the past year or so has felt different: The conversation seems to have evolved from jargony promises of algorithm-driven efficiency to something much more tangible and immediate.

Digital marketing is feeling the early effects of this shift. While learning algorithms have already been a vital part of digital ad campaigns for years, marketing giants like Google Ads and Meta Ads have recently made those campaigns the centerpieces of their platforms. Add in generative text, image, and video capabilities both inside and outside these platforms and you may begin to wonder…what’s left for the humans in the marketing industry?

It’s a fair question to ask. Listening to AI evangelists and digital marketing product announcements, a cynical observer may be led to believe that time is running out on the digital marketing agency model. But even though AI tools are already changing how agencies work, we don’t believe they’ll ever eliminate the need for them.

In this blog, we’ll explore marketing AI’s past to determine its future and what that means for everyone involved.

AI Campaigns Have Already Changed How Marketers Work

Even before this flurry of attention on “AI-powered” marketing campaigns, Google and Meta had been offering self-optimizing, machine learning-based features for some time.

From “Smart” to Smarter

Google’s “Smart” campaigns (like Smart Shopping) and “maximize” bid strategies (like Maximize Conversions) were partial predecessors to its newest developments. While these campaigns and strategies relied on algorithmic learnings to identify the right users to target, they still allowed granular tailoring and offered more transparent data reporting.

The current generation of campaigns hands more control over to the algorithms. Rather than building highly-specific ads and deploying format-specific campaigns, tools like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ ask for a range of creative elements, headlines, and guidelines. They then rely on the algorithms to find potential customers and deliver ads to them in opportune formats at opportune times, with fewer user inputs guiding the way.

These campaigns can provide substantial performance benefits. When Advantage+ debuted, one ADM client compared their Meta Ads success to “Facebook in the old days,” as in: before Apple’s fateful 2021 iOS14 update greatly diminished ad performance on the platform. Likewise, we find Performance Max to be a first-choice Google Ads campaign for most of its potential applications.

Those results, however, come at the expense of some control and clarity, which can sometimes create the feeling of a “black box.” This dynamic can hinder a marketer’s ability to fully analyze their successful campaigns and apply those learnings elsewhere. 

Embracing the Challenges

The opacity of these campaign types, however, didn’t make agency work easier or less important. This dynamic just ended up creating new challenges for leading agencies to solve. When everyone suddenly got their hands on better tools, the best marketers set out to find ways to deploy them even more competitively. If insights weren’t immediately accessible, it just meant we had to look harder to find them.

At ADM, our Google Premier Partner status gave us early access to testing Performance Max—which we used to validate the technology earlier than most and begin finding methodologies for deploying them better than the next agency might. We also worked to deploy custom scripts that would break out further insights that couldn’t be seen in the Google Ads platform.

Cutting down build times and daily optimizations opened up more time for other work, which greatly benefits both brands and their customers. As Aaron Nelson, ADM’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing explains:

“When I started 14 or 15 years ago, the job was a lot of lever-pulling. Now it’s shifted toward strategizing where we’re spending money, shaping creative strategy, looking at the business holistically, and testing to find what resonates with customers.”

Generative AI Tools Introduce New Conveniences—and Concerns

Machine learning algorithms have been shaping campaigns for years, but generative AI is the technology that recently brought AI buzz to a fever pitch. Though still, in its own way, a black box, it feels more tangible: You issue a prompt for text, images, or videos, and the machine attempts to fulfill that vision to the best of its abilities.

Integration into Marketing Platforms

Popular Generative AI tools include well-known platforms like Grok and ChatGPT, as well as others like Midjourney, Runway, and Synthesia. Marketers are beginning to use this technology to iterate new ad copy and visuals quickly.

But generative AI is also increasing its presence within the marketing platforms themselves. Google and Meta each have their own built-in tools, with capabilities growing by the quarter. Purposes include writing headlines and descriptions or contextualizing eCommerce products with virtual try-ons and generated backgrounds. These tools are mostly sensible and can enhance customer experiences when deployed correctly.

Another social titan, TikTok, is now offering even-more advanced AI ad functions (like video creation). Such tools are absolutely on the horizon for Google and Meta. At the moment, though, TikTok encourages these to be used for ideation rather than final ad creation. To discerning marketers, that makes the most sense. Even though creative assets can now be generated with a few keystrokes, the resulting quality can fall anywhere between “passable” or “appealing” to “uncanny” or “nightmarish.”

Why Human Oversight is Essential

Even if generative AI is convenient, it’s still too inconsistent to be trusted with a brand’s reputation. And while it may help you generate a nice-looking image now and then, seeing the big picture is still a mostly-human function. At the end of the day, brands and their marketing partners are best-equipped to chart their creative strategies.

“Every brand has its own distinct voice, style, and brand standards. Those distinct voices will absolutely be lost if brands relied on fully-automated messaging,” ADM’s Director of Paid Social, Alex Andrews, says. “Generative AI requires specific, exhaustive prompts to produce coherent outputs.” Meaning even if the tools get good enough at producing satisfactory materials on demand, those demands still need to be grounded in clear intent and thorough understanding of quality, voice, and audience.

Instead of being a technology that totally erases entire sectors of the marketing industry—graphic designers, copywriters, videographers—these tools currently just end up augmenting that work through iterative support. Marketing creative is a form of storytelling, and the algorithms aren’t in a position to tell your brand what stories it should be telling. We believe that creating human connection is a process that will likely always involve actual humans—even if new technology speeds that work up a little.

Where AI Marketing is Headed

If the past few years have been about introducing AI-driven campaign formats and generative AI integrations, the next few will be about making them the default.

Google’s recent platform changes point toward an ecosystem dominated by its so-called “Power Pack” of campaigns: Performance Max, AI Max, and Demand Gen. Together, these three are meant to cover nearly all common advertising objectives while requiring fewer manual inputs from marketers. While Google has added some deeper insights since the format first launched, it’s still difficult to fully map placements, audiences, and actions together.

As these campaigns come to dominate Google Ads, it’s fair to assume that legacy campaign types could see diminished prominence—or even eventually be phased out. That doesn’t mean standard Search campaigns will disappear overnight, but they may eventually become less competitive if Google begins to prioritize these AI campaigns.

Meta, for its part, is being even more direct and audacious about its AI campaign dreams.

Earlier this year, the social giant promised fully-automated campaign creation by 2026. In theory, the idea is that anyone will be able to throw a URL into Meta Ads and have the platform build out everything—creative, copy, audiences, strategies—that can be deployed when paired with a budget and a campaign goal.

Whether that can actually deliver effective campaigns remains to be seen. Meta certainly is not immune to over-promising and under-delivering on big visions (RIP to the Metaverse). But the fact that both of the world’s largest digital ad platforms are leaning this hard into automation should raise eyebrows among skeptical marketers. 

Why This AI-Powered Marketing Future Still Requires Agencies

If anything, the more AI becomes woven into the fabric of digital advertising, the more important it becomes to have human expertise at the helm. For both clients and the marketing platforms themselves, agencies will continue to play an integral role in ensuring that tools are deployed correctly and improve continually.

Platforms Need Liaisons and Testers

Platforms like Google and Meta rely on agencies to steward their largest accounts, test and validate their new tools, and expand advertiser adoption across channels.

This is one of the many reasons that initiatives like the Google Premier Partner program exist. If the goal is to eliminate agencies by making AI tools that any novice can use, Google Ads would be left trying to piece together insights from millions of generic campaign deployments.

Instead, they put their technology in the hands of experienced experts and pay close attention to how veteran marketers build with and bend the tools. On occasion, Google Ads will reach out to agencies directly for feedback on its functionality, as ADM’s Senior Director of Search Engine Marketing, Erica Magnotto, recently explained.

By acting as liaisons to the biggest spenders and product testers for the newest tech, agencies help these marketing platforms grow their own revenue—so there’s strong incentive to keep them engaged and influential.

Advertisers Need Their Dollars Spent Wisely

Likewise, growing brands need assurance that their marketing dollars are being well spent and that their brand identity is being protected.

“Google will always say they’re spending your money wisely,” ADM’s Nelson says. “It’s on us to prove that’s actually true—tracking, measuring, and making sure we’re pursuing the right goals. That question—is our ad budget making a difference?—will never go away, and neither will the need for someone to answer it.”

Managing multi-million-dollar budgets, coordinating cross-channel strategies, and making long-term investment decisions require specialized experience and strategic vision. Even if these tools level the playing field for individual brands making their first forays into digital marketing, there will always be another level of complexity to discover at the highest levels of digital advertising competition.

And no matter how sophisticated AI-generated assets become, someone still has to prompt them effectively, evaluate the results, and ensure they align with brand voice, market context, and campaign goals. AI doesn’t yet understand cultural nuance, seasonal timing, or the kinds of emotional cues that separate “competent” creative from truly resonant work. Those judgments are human territory. Current generative AI tools don’t invent new approaches; they cobble together responses from existing materials.

AI isn’t here to replace agencies—it can’t. But it will inevitably reshape them, just as every new tool and innovation has in the past. In reality, agencies have grown and become sophisticated as this industry itself has. The ones that thrive going forward will be those that treat AI not as a threat, but as both a new advantage and a new challenge.

About the Author

Ryan Black Sr. Marketing Manager at Accelerated Digital Media

Ryan Black has been working at an expert performance marketing firm, Accelerated Digital Media, for 4 years as Marketing Copywriter, ascending to Sr. Marketing Manager. The University of Pittsburgh graduate previously worked as a healthcare industry reporter, a technology copywriter, and an SEM specialist.
 

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