Advertisers are starting to walk away from platforms’ AI solutions that once promised them everything

It’s hard to deny that AI will have a larger part of media buying — even as marketers will stall, resist and negotiate every inch of the way.

And who can blame them? The uneasy feeling that handing over control to AI, whether through Google’s Performance Max or Meta’s Advantage+ which each promised easier media buying, puts them further from understanding what they’re actually buying has been gnawing at them for a while. Back in December, media buyers voiced those concerns to Digiday. Now, it looks like they’re finally doing something about it.

That’s certainly true of one client at audience curation business Crowd Louder Media. According to John Davis, director of audience development at the company, they have just cut their Google spend by 50% — most of which was going on Performance Max — and moved half of it into the open web. However they didn’t share specifics on how much that spend accounted for. To be fair, some of this pushback stems from marketers hitting the ceiling on Performance Max, where pouring in more dollars just leads to diminishing returns, Nevertheless, those concerns might’ve been easier to stomach they say, if the platform’s AI had inspired more confidence.

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