Automation Is Rewriting the Performance Marketing Playbook

For more than a decade, performance marketers distinguished themselves with their skill in stringing together the perfect set of keywords for Google or picking the right attributes for a likely-to-purchase audience on Facebook. But as both platforms lean more heavily into automation, marketers say these skills are becoming less relevant, in favor of chops in creativity or data science. As a result, more marketers are hiring new kinds of talent or refocusing staff priorities. “It felt like we had a soccer team and [now] it’s a basketball court,” said Taylor Offer, co-founder of direct-to-consumer brand Feat Clothing, who said he switched agencies after new tools from Meta and Google made performance marketing skills less relevant, and other abilities, like creative, more important. “It’s hard. You have people who are extremely good soccer players and can’t play basketball for their life." Performance marketing, which optimizes for results like sales instead of creating brand awareness, became prominent in the past two decades as tech made tracking, targeting and measuring consumer behavior easier than ever. But today, cookie deprecation is making less of this data available, and digital platforms such as Meta, Google and Microsoft have publicly stated their intention to invest heavily in artificial intelligence. The platforms' efforts have so far resulted in a bevy of advertising tools, including Meta’s Advantage+, which lets algorithms choose audiences and creative assets; and Google’s Performance Max, where AI decides how to distribute ad spend across all of Google’s properties, including YouTube, Search and Maps, with no keyword writing required. Digital agency Croud is currently training biddable media experts in data science—to more effectively utilize clients’ first-party data sets—and commerce, and it plans to eventually teach these skills to all staff members who work with data on a daily basis, said Kris Tait, managing director, U.S. Before Performance Max, There Was Google’s App Campaigns, Muddying Transparency “Targeting and audiences are going to be taken care of by the machines,” Tait said. “Which is great because it’s a bit menial.” Nadia Martinez, who runs ecommerce agency Social Retail Marketing, said last November that she started to shift the jobs of four staffers toward content creation versus purely buying ads on Meta, after noticing that “people were ending their workday a little bit earlier" due to Advantage+. “[Now] they’re so excited about learning something. When you’re running ads constantly, it can get the same every day.” The industry is still figuring out how performance marketing will look in an age of automation. But despite this uncertainty, brands are investing in performance tactics in 2023, especially when a looming recession spurs marketers to prioritize advertising they can directly link to sales. As such, 28% of advertisers are planning on increasing their performance spend this year, compared to 21% who are planning to increase on brand efforts, according to an October 2022 World Federation of Advertisers and Ebiquity report. A focus on creativity With automation tools giving performance marketers less control of the nuances of media buying, many are retooling their focus to creative, which some thought of as traditionally outside the domain of the digitally minded. “Performance marketers are becoming more like creatives, and creatives are becoming more like performance marketers,” said Nikhil Lai, senior analyst of performance marketing at Forrester. However, performance marketers can still apply their analytical skills to creative assets: Lai said a CMO of a pasta brand rigorously tested a variety of photo backgrounds with different pasta photos, along with several combinations of the two, to see which worked best with audiences. Performance marketers need to be increasingly thinking 'customer first' and not just looking at data and spreadsheets.Jamie MacNaughton, head of digital marketing, Tails.com DTC dog-food brand Tails.com has relied more on Google tools that dynamically test different keywords to see which audiences they best resonate with. Because of that, Tails.com doesn’t always know who saw its search ads, said head of digital marketing Jamie MacNaughton. As a result, when designing digital assets like the landing page, the company must restate its selling points, like all the benefits of its product for the dog and owner, which consumers may or may not have encountered already via search advertising. “Performance marketers need to be increasingly thinking 'customer first' and not just looking at data and spreadsheets,” MacNaughton said. Skepticism of machines The extent to which new AI-enhanced tools remake performance marketing depends on how much advertisers actually use these new products. And so far, not all advertisers are on board with the notion that the machine is always right. Many marketers have previously complained to Adweek that Performance Max and its mobile counterpart App Campaigns give brands too little transparency, and they siphon dollars toward inventory that they might not want. (A Google spokesperson told Adweek, “We are highly encouraged by the results our customers have realized from Performance Max, and we are continuing to invest in ways to help marketers build on these results.”) And while marketers don't need to know as many nuances of social ad buying, they still can't let the machines run on autopilot. “The AI is not magically going to work,” Lai said. “You still need a really clear idea of what your goal is. Some of that strategic decision-[making] … is still rare and still valuable.”

Performance Marketing

Automation Is Rewriting the Performance Marketing Playbook

Marketers shift staff priorities as new Google and Meta tools make their keyword and targeting skills less relevant

UNLOCK FULL ACCESS

Catherine Perloff

Performance Marketing

Healthcare Marketers Rethink Infrastructure in Search of Real-Time Results

Trust and Incrementality Help Brands Scale Bigger Ideas

Entries Open for ADWEEK Tech Challengers to Watch 2027

How Marketers Can Deliver Outcomes Across Fragmented Journeys

A More Intelligent Advertising Ecosystem Is on the Horizon

How the Performance Marketing Reset Affects the Open Web

When Past Purchases Aren’t Enough Anymore

ADWEEK Innovator 50 Entries Now Open for 2026

Permutive Recruits Former IPG Mediabrands CEO to Board in Buy-Side Push