What’s Already Changed?
The transformation isn’t coming; it’s here. While the press debate AI’s potential, the technology has quietly revolutionised core performance marketing functions at a pace that’s hard to grasp:
Campaign management has fundamentally shifted. Manual ad uploads are becoming obsolete. Defining targeting options on ad platforms is no longer the major strategic decision it once was. With a skilled practitioner guiding, paid media optimisation and budget allocation can now be largely automated, though human oversight remains crucial for feeding the models effectively and ensuring strategic alignment.
Creative production has exploded beyond recognition. Meta and other social platforms don’t just serve your ads – they automatically generate countless variations, testing and optimising creative elements in real-time. The entire end-to-end creative strategy process, from initial concept through production to increasingly lifelike creators, can now be facilitated by AI, at speeds and quality levels that surpass traditional teams.
This isn’t a threat to creatives – it’s liberating. When AI handles the mechanical aspects of creative production, human creativity can reach new heights. Designers and strategists can focus on big-picture thinking, brand storytelling, and innovative concepts while AI executes variations and optimisations.
Campaign measurement has become conversational and instantaneous. Teams can now type requests for reports on the performance of specific products, into Slack and receive detailed charts within seconds. Natural language processing allows for immediate generation of performance breakdowns from complex datasets, eliminating the wait times that once characterised campaign analysis.
Furthermore, the democratisation of no-code and low-code development tools is enabling teams to build hyper-relevant, use-case specific proprietary applications and technology solutions that help ecommerce companies grow faster and more profitably with paid media – tools that would have required significant development resources just years ago.
This shift represents more than efficiency gains – it’s a fundamental reimagining of what performance marketing teams can achieve and how they deliver value.
Surviving & Thriving in This New Landscape
As AI adoption accelerates – with 78% of organisations now using AI in at least one business function – performance marketing teams (whether in-house or agency) will face a survival-of-the-fittest scenario. Four critical shifts are separating the winners from those who’ll be left behind:
Data will become your competitive moat
The breadth and depth of your data will separate winners from losers. This is particularly exciting for agencies who have access to larger and broader datasets than in-house teams, as AI and automation can transform the data into insights and recommendations that drive improved ROI.
But raw data won’t be enough. It’s how you structure and feed it to AI systems that will determine the quality of strategic intelligence you can extract. Managing data according to best practices – proper structure, classification, and tagging – will become essential for mapping trends and unlocking unique insights that drive a competitive edge.
Human augmentation will be non-negotiable
Whether you’re managing paid media campaigns in-house or via an agency, teams without AI augmentation simply won’t be able to compete with those that are. It’s that stark. After all, you wouldn’t expect a mathematician without a calculator to be able to manually solve problems as quickly and efficiently as one with a calculator could.
SaaS automations are improving the efficiency and effectiveness of every aspect of the paid media process, from creative development to testing and reporting, while making custom tech solutions accessible to teams that could never afford bespoke development. The real differentiator won’t be having AI tools – it’ll be how seamlessly you integrate them into your workflows to amplify human creativity and strategic thinking.
Strategy and data science will take centre stage
As campaigns become increasingly automated, strategic expertise and data science skills will become more valuable, not less. Increased automation, for all its benefits, requires a certain degree of trust in the technology. As it becomes increasingly difficult to ‘look under the hood’ of paid media campaigns, having trusted advisors with expertise in data science and campaign measurement will become critical to testing hypotheses about the efficacy and value of various campaigns, channels, and promotions – independently verifying that the automations of platforms like Google, Meta and Amazon are driving desired business outcomes.
Strategic expertise will be required to ask AI the right questions – in the right structure, with prompts that extract the best outputs – and interpret the results. Humans must connect dots that algorithms might miss, based on our intuition about culture, brand behaviour, consumer psychology, and shifting market landscapes. This contextual understanding remains uniquely human and becomes more valuable as AI handles the mechanical tasks.
Process definition and continuous learning will become essential
Well defined processes to manage various paid media functions have always been important for minimising human error and working efficiently. In the age of AI, these processes will become absolutely essential to ensure seamless handoffs between AI and humans for each task or micro-task.
Clear guidelines must articulate what the technology has accomplished and what tasks remain necessary for your team. This role definition between tech and humans is critical to ensuring AI augments human creativity rather than becoming a dumbed-down replacement that churns out poorly performing campaigns.
Equally important is building feedback loops for AI within these processes, enabling the technology to learn and improve its performance and understanding of context over time, further augmenting the human intelligence directing it.
Continuous upskilling and experimentation will become equally critical. The pace of AI advancement means teams must be agile; constantly learning and experimenting with new tools as the landscape evolves at breakneck speed.
Why Humans Are More Important Than Ever
Here’s the paradox that many miss: as AI becomes more capable, humans will become more essential, not less. Just as calculators didn’t eliminate the need for mathematicians but elevated their work to higher-level problem-solving, AI elevates performance marketers to focus on strategy, creativity, and complex problem-solving – driving more value.
AI won’t replace performance marketers; it will unburden them so they can focus on what matters most. Strategic thinking, cultural fluency, and brand intuition will become more valuable than ever. These uniquely human traits, when amplified by AI capabilities, create the breakthrough creative concepts, insights, and business impact that drive sustainable growth.
The calculator only undermined those who refused to adopt it. Similarly, AI will fundamentally enable performance marketers to move up the value chain, making human expertise more critical than ever before.
Building the Future: AI-Native Performance Marketing
The implications for the industry are profound. AI is redefining what agencies and in-house performance marketing teams can achieve. Teams that are AI-native, with agile and adaptive mindsets, hungrily testing the latest technological advancements and using them to curate, interpret, and contextualise AI insights in commercially relevant ways, will thrive.
At BARK, we’re not just observing this transformation – we’re working on architecting it. We’re building AI-native systems and processes that will deliver an unfair advantage to our ecommerce clients, so they can reap the benefits of combining cutting-edge AI capabilities with human ingenuity.
The calculator has arrived in performance marketing. The question isn’t whether to adopt it – it’s whether you’ll master it before your competition does.
