A panel of three PPC marketing experts – Greg Finn (Cypress North), Kerri Amodio (Refine Labs), and Menachem Ani (JXT Group) – tackled a fundamental question at SMX Next: Is AI making marketers better?
The panel discussed artificial intelligence’s evolving role in marketing, offering insights into its promises and pitfalls.
The discussion was nuanced. While AI excels at increasing output quantity, there are serious concerns about quality.
The new PPC mindset
Finn notably argued that AI is potentially making marketing worse when used as a complete solution rather than a strategic tool:
“Is it being able to produce more items and content, things like that. I would say yes, if quantity is your guiding light, but if it’s quality, I would argue strongly that AI is making marketing in general and marketers worse.
“People really rely on AI to do things that I think could probably be done better by a human. And a lot of the changes in platforms themselves really lend themselves to just worse.
“It really comes down to how we’re using it and those people that are using it as a strategy, not a tactic, I think it’s making them worse.”
This sentiment was echoed by his fellow panelists, who emphasized the importance of thoughtful implementation.
Ani said:
“Like a lot of things, it’s really how you use it. It makes it very easy to get bad output, I think almost too easy.
“The harder you work at something, the better it’s gonna be. So a lot of it really comes down to how you use it, but it can make marketers better if you’re gonna use it in, in better ways.”
Amodio, agreeing with her fellow experts, expressed that AI can make you a more efficient worker:
“It can make you a more efficient worker, a more efficient marketer. It can come up with different strategies for you that maybe you wouldn’t have tested on your own.
“But it also does muddy the waters. It makes us play a game that we are trying to fit our marketing into a box. And that’s not always a good thing.
“Having to write a certain amount of copy, having to have a certain amount of assets, it can sometimes make us overproduce, quantity over quality and that is where it’s making AI marketers even worse than they were before.”
Where AI shines
The experts identified several areas where AI demonstrates clear value. Automated bidding emerged as a unanimous success story, with Amodio noting she used “smart bidding” in 99% of cases.
Ani shared the success he sees with automated bidding:
“When we utilize like smart bidding in the ad platform, more algorithmic bidding as opposed to manual bidding.
“Those are a lot more advanced than utilizing some of the AI tools to build creative assets, to write copy, things of that nature.
“So in, in my experience, that’s where it shines right now, but I think there’s a lot of others as well.”
Amodio said:
“I’m going to use smart bidding 99% of the time, to be honest.
“I have seen it do well in audience targeting scenarios, but there are certain guardrails that you need to put up in order to find the right people.
“You need to be really diligent about putting a little bit of manual work into that automation and making sure from a backend reporting perspective that you are reaching the right people.
“But sometimes you can take those guardrails down, let it go find those conversions for you – and I have seen it work well.
“So for some brands, it’s going to work better than others.”
Finn agreed with his fellow experts on the automated bidding front but also touched on Performance Max campaigns – when properly structured with clear conversion goals, is potentially effective, particularly in ecommerce settings:
“I’ll just agree on the bidding standpoint, and I do think it’ll be more pronounced
with eCPC going away. It already went away in shopping, at least for Google Ads, and is going away for search ads as well.
“I also think in some supporting assets like using AI in general to come up with more shorts
or vertical video, help edit some of those things down. If we’re taking a clip of this [talk], there are a lot of tools that can go through and do a lot of that work for you.
“Something like a Pmax, with the proper structure, the proper conversion set up the proper game plan in place, it can dominate manual and that’s just a fact.
“I think it’s really good at broad match. I hated broad match for the majority of my life. I still don’t like saying that I like it now, but broad match DSAs, some of those automation and AI tactics can really go through and get better, coverage for you.”
Common misconceptions about AI in marketing
The panel identified several misconceptions.
A primary concern was the false belief that AI makes things easier.