If you are thinking about handing over your advertising campaigns to AI ad management tools, it is worth taking a step back. These tools can be incredibly useful for small tasks – tweaking budgets, pausing underperforming campaigns, and offering surface-level recommendations.
But there is a major flaw. AI tools only see one side of the story: the ad account metrics. They do not, and cannot, consider the bigger picture – your business.
What AI Agents Miss About Your Business
When you let AI run your ads without deeper strategic input, it will not ask the questions that actually matter to your profitability.
It will not ask:
- How is this campaign impacting our bottom line?
- Are we acquiring high-quality customers who will come back and order again?
- Should we be shifting spend based on seasonality, market trends, or even internal cash flow realities?
Instead, AI systems chase surface-level goals like maximising volume, minimising CPA, and achieving short-term wins that often look impressive on paper but fail to move the needle where it counts.
This is why so many brands who blindly follow automated recommendations end up wasting budget. They load up on cheap clicks that might make the dashboard glow green, but do very little to drive sustainable growth or lifetime value.
It Is Not About Being Anti-AI
To be absolutely clear – I am not against leveraging AI. Far from it. At HOC, we use AI tools every day to enhance our processes, analyse data faster, and spot opportunities we might otherwise miss. When used properly, AI can be a powerful accelerator for any marketing programme.
The real question is not whether AI has value. It is whether AI should be used as a full replacement for strategic consultancy – especially when it comes to aligning your ad campaigns with broader business goals.
And the answer is no.
Automation can optimise towards what it can measure. But it cannot understand your brand positioning, your customer lifetime value, your operational challenges, or the nuances of your profitability model. It cannot make judgment calls based on experience, intuition, or real-world market shifts.
AI is a tool – not a strategist. If you treat it as an assistant rather than the decision-maker, you can get the best results. Strategy should always lead. Automation should support.
Ads Do Not Exist in Isolation
The reality is that advertising does not happen in a vacuum. Your campaigns are part of a wider ecosystem that includes your margins, customer journey, seasonality, product-market fit, and overall business health.
If you are only looking at what your Ads Manager is telling you, you are only seeing half the picture. The danger is you end up optimising for vanity metrics, while missing what actually drives long-term profitability.
Strategy First, Ads Second
Before we even think about opening Ads Manager, we roll up our sleeves and dive deep into the numbers that matter.
We ask questions like:
- What is your true breakeven CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)?
- Based on your margins, how much can you realistically afford to pay to acquire a customer?
- What percentage of customers come back to buy again, and how does that affect your LTV (Lifetime Value)?
We map out your unit economics in detail. We calculate your contribution margin. We analyse how much revenue is actually coming from new customers, versus repeat buyers.
Without this foundation, any advertising effort is essentially guesswork – and in today’s market, guesswork is expensive.
The Role AI Should Play
AI has its place. It is excellent for helping with repetitive tasks, spotting trends, and making basic optimisations. But it is not a replacement for strategic thinking.
If you want to scale your ads profitably, you cannot rely solely on automation. You need a strategy that is rooted in financial realities, customer behaviour, and the bigger picture of your business goals.
When you put strategy first and use AI as a tool rather than a crutch, you get the best of both worlds – efficiency, without sacrificing business intelligence.
