Marketers are handing more of their workflows over to AI — testing media activation agents, making creative and scaling it. The line around what still requires a human touch, however, is fuzzy.
Some executives are wary of AI-generated creative ideas while using automated tools to brainstorm campaigns. Others insist AI’s role in how brands talk to shoppers should be limited, while relying on it to scale assets consumers see.
What marketers can agree on: they trust AI to help them spend their money — but not craft the messages they want to spend around.
Loss of control and consumer backlash
“AI is incredibly useful for accelerating the mechanics of marketing, but the closer it gets to defining the meaning of the brand itself, the more cautious leaders become,” said Sunny Bonnell, brand innovator, co-founder and CEO of branding agency Motto.
Part of marketers’ apprehension is around losing control as there’s little to no insight as to how agents make decisions. There also seems to be fear of backlash, like Coca-Cola’s AI-made holiday ad in 2024. That fear makes sense — at least from a numbers perspective. Even as AI becomes standard in marketing workflows, shoppers are mixed in their response to AI generated creative outputs.
Sixty-eight percent of shoppers say they don’t mind AI in advertising, as long as it makes ads more relevant, according to Canva’s 2026 State of Marketing and AI Report. At the same time 78% of shoppers from the same study say they’d rather see ads made by people.
Effeciency versus ethos
Ally Bank’s in-house team has started testing automated tools in its programmatic media buys to speed them up, said Ally Bank’s chief marketing and PR officer Andrea Brimmer, who did not provide specifics.
Ally also uses AI for content creation on the backend, but hasn’t produced consumer-facing creative, Brimmer said. “I’ve been a little more tepid in terms of the creativity,” she said. “The media and efficiency makes tons of sense — workplace productivity, all of those things.”
To Brimmer, the creative scale and efficiencies that AI agents promise may not be worth the public backlash. “I do know and see empirically that particularly the younger generation just regales against anything created by AI,” she added.
Ellie Uberto, director of marketing at Duluth, makes a similar case, and recently said as much during a live recording of the Digiday Podcast hosted during Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit.
Related Insights
The lifestyle and apparel retailer has been willing to hand off tasks like bidding and creative iteration management to AI agents. Brand voice, sense of humor and brand ethos are more guarded with human oversight, Uberto said.
For the Mondelez-owned snack brand LUNA Bar, agents are relegated to brainstorming. Valerie Van Arkel, a brand director for Mondelez, declined to say if Mondelez’s agency partner uses agents for media buying. But from a creative standpoint, insights are developed by the Mondelez marketing team. Creative ideas are in partnership with the brand’s creative agency partners, Van Arkel said.
“We are not handing it over to AI to help us develop that true consumer insight that would design the campaign,” the exec said. “That comes from the research that we’ve done, our connection to our audience, our understanding of the market and what consumers are looking for.”
Limitations of automation
It’s not that tech companies aren’t trying to push the matter. Platforms like Google and Canva within the past year have released what could be considered AI-powered agency-in-a-box — AI marketing tools to generate and scale social media campaigns.
Seemingly, in the time that’s passed since those tools hit the market late last year, marketers remain unconvinced. At branding agency Motto, companies are pulling back how prominent AI is in things like branding, messaging and identify systems, per Bonnell.
“… because they’re discovering that trust, emotion, taste, and cultural relevance cannot be automated into existence,” she added.