For over twenty years, marketers balanced technical implementation with strategy, spending hours on platform configuration, algorithm decoding, manual data collection, and performance review. Extensive time on backend tasks and account structuring often reduced time available for creativity, storytelling, and strategic offers. Practices like SKAGs required intensive spreadsheet work and manual uploads, sometimes without delivering better outcomes. The rise of AI and AI-driven features in ad platforms reduces the need for manual technical work. Marketers can now allocate more effort to creative development, ad copy, narratives, and human connection while leveraging AI to handle targeting and technical optimization.
For over two decades, ever since the dot com days and emergence of digital marketing, marketers have been busy with and characterized by technical implementation, as much as by strategy.Most marketers spent hours dealing with platform configuration and setup, decoding and interpreting search algorithms, and manual data collection and reviewing performance data. As important as these disciplines are, they left little room for what marketing should have always been: creativity, storytelling, strategic thinking, and human connection.
I still remember spending hours, sometimes days, setting up what we used to call SKAGs (short single keyword ad groups) in Google Ads. Essentially we were creating separate ads for each keyword we were bidding on. That gave us control and it had many optimization benefits. But depending on keyword list and campaign size, it was a time-intensive task. I spent hours in spreadsheets, formatting the account structure before uploading it to the Google Ads platform.
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