3 Ways AI Helps Advertisers Work Smarter, Not Harder
The advertising industry stands at an inflection point.
While headlines proclaim that artificial intelligence will replace human expertise, the reality unfolding across successful campaigns tells a different story. The most effective application of AI isn't about replacement – it's about amplification.
AI-driven advertising strategies have already demonstrated measurable impact, with studies showing performance improvements of up to 32% for brands leveraging AI-powered decisioning. But these gains don't come from automating strategy itself. Instead, they emerge when teams harness AI insights to handle complex back-end operations, freeing strategists to focus on what humans do best: Creative problem-solving and relationship building.
Managing over $12 billion in advertising spend annually across brands, agencies and retailers reveals where the real opportunity lies. The most successful advertisers aren't using AI to replace their teams. They're using it to eliminate the operational friction that prevents those teams from doing their best work.
How Buy-Side Teams Leverage AI
For advertisers and agencies, AI transforms the constant challenge of campaign optimization from a reactive scramble into a proactive advantage.
The most successful buy-side teams focus on three key applications:
Real-Time Campaign Optimization: Rather than waiting for weekly reports to identify underperforming campaigns, AI analyzes performance data continuously, enabling dynamic budget adjustments that improve return on ad spend. This shift from periodic to perpetual optimization means budget dollars flow to high-performing tactics before opportunities close.
Advanced Targeting Capabilities: AI excels at pattern recognition across massive datasets, helping advertisers refine audience segmentation with precision that would be impossible manually. The result is more precise targeting that drives higher engagement rates while reducing wasted impressions.
- Streamlined Financial Management: Reconciling vendor invoices against actual campaign delivery often feels like financial forensics, as it involves manually matching line items across disparate systems and identifying discrepancies. AI automates this reconciliation process, connecting invoices to delivery data and flagging discrepancies instantly. This not only catches billing errors but also surfaces budget optimization opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How Sell-Side Teams Are Maximizing Yield
Publishers and platforms face their own operational complexity. That includes identifying the most valuable inventory segments, predicting demand fluctuations and structuring deals for maximum yield. AI is transforming these challenges as well in the following key areas:
Smarter Inventory Management: Publishers employ AI to predict demand patterns and optimize pricing strategies dynamically. This ensures better yield management and more effective inventory utilization, particularly during high-value periods when manual adjustments can't keep pace with market conditions.
Faster Proposals and Planning: Sales teams and media planners leverage AI to accelerate proposal creation. By analyzing performance history and campaign context, AI can draft detailed sales proposals and media plans down to the line-item level. This reduction in manual work, combined with performance-informed recommendations, increases both sales velocity and team productivity.
Proactive Performance Monitoring: Underperforming campaigns represent lost revenue for publishers and missed goals for advertisers, a lose-lose scenario. AI monitors campaign performance proactively, identifying delivery issues early and recommending corrective actions. This preserves revenue, protects advertiser relationships and maintains publisher reputation.
The Future of AI-Assisted Advertising
The advertising industry's sweet spot lies in AI-assisted operations, where automation handles repetitive execution behind the scenes while human expertise drives innovation, strategy and creative excellence.
Teams that embrace this hybrid approach gain a sustainable competitive advantage. They operate with the efficiency of automation while maintaining the strategic insight and relationship skills that technology cannot replicate.
The question isn't whether AI will change advertising — it already has. The question is whether teams will use it to amplify their capabilities or simply add another tool to an already overcrowded stack.
About the Author
Evan Bowen is Chief Business Officer at Placements.io, bringing 15 years of ad tech expertise to help sellers and buyers navigate the digital advertising landscape. He serves as a trusted partner to leading brands including Walmart, Ahold Delhaize, United Airlines, Walgreens, and The Home Depot.
