Your ad platform can make an ad without asking you
Meta and Google will touch up your creative on their own. Ask Equinox how that goes.
Happy morning!
There’s a setting in your ad account you’ve never opened. It’s on.
Ad Age reported this week that Meta and Google’s platforms can generate and adjust creative on their own, from adding music to “visual touch-ups,” under automation settings most brands never toggled off. The ad that runs under your name is no longer guaranteed to be the ad you approved.
Sit with that. Your brand safety review, your legal sign-off, your one pedantic person who catches the thing everyone else missed. All of it assumes a human put the ad up. Increasingly, one didn’t.
The failure mode isn’t a checkbox you forgot. It’s a checkbox that re-checks itself after a platform update, quietly, on a Tuesday. You find out when someone outside the building takes a screenshot.
Go into Meta and Google today and read what’s switched on. Not what you set. What’s on now. Some of these settings turn themselves back on after you turn them off, which is its own kind of tell about who the tool is really working for.
— Peter & Torsten
Talk on the market
Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify, on the week’s study:
“AI itself is not what determines engagement. The quality of the output does. Innovation cannot come at the expense of media quality, transparency or trust.”
He runs a verification company, so of course he’s selling trust. Doesn’t make him wrong. The brands getting burned this year aren’t the ones using AI. They’re the ones who stopped looking at what it made.
Numbers matter
48% — The share of marketers who say they’re concerned about using AI to build ad creative, rising to 63% in North America, in DoubleVerify’s new study.
Nearly half the industry is nervous about the exact feature their ad platforms just switched on by default.
Daily prompt
Act as a brand safety lead. Here are the automated and AI creative settings currently enabled in our Meta and Google ad accounts: [paste the list]. For each, tell me what it can change without human approval, the worst on-brand-but-wrong outcome it could produce, and whether to leave it on, gate it, or kill it. Flag any setting known to re-enable itself after platform updates.
Use this as a standing monthly check, not a one-time audit, because the settings drift back. Thirty minutes here is the difference between catching a rogue auto-generated ad in your account and reading about it in someone’s screenshot. Put a recurring calendar hold on it today.
Have a tool or service that you want to get in front of our audience? Reach 20,000+ marketers who read AI-Ready CMO every day.
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CMO corner
Step out of the spotlight so the system can shine.
Fine advice, right up until the system ships a billboard nobody vetted. Delegating to agents isn’t the same as abdicating the standard. You still own the guardrails. You just stopped owning the keystrokes.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.
If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.
Tool upgrade
If you want AI in your creative, make the ad yourself so the platform doesn’t make one for you. Three tools for creative you actually approve:
HeyGen — best for on-brand AI video and avatars where you sign off on every frame before it runs. Try HeyGen here →
Descript — best for editing video and audio like a text doc, so revisions take minutes and stay in your hands. Try Descript here →
Pictory — best for turning long-form content into short social cuts without handing creative control to an ad engine. Try Pictory here →
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Learn this
Build a content system that assumes review instead of hoping for it:
It’s for teams scaling AI creative who want speed without the Equinox moment, with a structure that keeps a human in the loop where it counts. The point isn’t less AI. It’s AI that can’t ship unseen.
We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.
That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
