The future of advertising isn't choosing between AI and humans. It's knowing what each does best.

I hand bidding, targeting and budget optimisation over to machine learning. Performance Max and Advantage+ read auction signals and audience data faster than any human team could manage, and they don't get tired or emotionally attached to a campaign that isn't working. For founders and marketing managers watching a media budget, that shift usually means faster, more consistent decisions than a person working alone could ever make.

Creative is a different story.

Meta and Google are increasingly making creative decisions on your behalf: cropping images, adding music, generating ad copy, choosing which version of an ad to show and to who. Some of it works well. Some of it doesn't and I've seen it go wrong more than once recently.

I recently audited a Google account where almost every AI-generated asset feature had been left switched on. Google was creating its own videos, expanding landing pages and generating extra text, all without the business owner realising it was happening. None of it was malicious, and some of it may even have improved performance. But a lot of it no longer reflected how the brand wanted to show up.

That's the pattern I keep seeing. Nothing is technically broken. The decisions are just ones the brand wouldn't have made itself - and small enough to run for weeks before anyone notices.

So, here's the split I use across every account I run. If a feature only affects who sees an ad, when, or how budget moves between it, I let it run and monitor the results. If it touches what the customer actually sees, reads or hears, I review it before it goes live, every time.

That's not me being precious about control. AI is brilliant at pattern matching and still weak on judgement. It doesn't know your customers the way you do, and it has no instinct to flag when something is technically correct but instinctively off.

Automate the mechanics. Keep a human on anything that shapes how the brand feels.

I get into more of the detail, including where else I've seen this go wrong, in this week's newsletter.

Get the balance right and you get the best of both worlds.