AI Will Soon Dominate Ad Buying. Will Marketers Trust the Algorithm?
11:50 Share

With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business, powering possibilities. Restrictions apply. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, March 10th. I'm Sharla Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal.

Today's new cars have lots of bells and whistles when it comes to tech. Lane sensing, extra screens, windshield wipers that detect rain, interior mood lighting.

And while some drivers love high-tech features, others say it's too much. Then, artificial intelligence will soon dominate ad buying. But marketers have mixed feelings. AI tools could boost sales and increase efficiency, but with less transparency. WSJ reporter Patrick Coffey tells us how advertisers are grappling with the trade-offs.

But first, is smart tech in cars getting too smart? WSJ reporter Joe Pinsker finds that some drivers wish their cars were just a little bit dumber. Joe, my car is not super smart, so give me a picture here. How tricked out can a car get?

A car can have a very big touchscreen. It can have a couple other fun little trimmings like seasonal ambient lighting is something that's out there these days. Night vision, perhaps. Also, if one screen wasn't enough in the middle of the car, you can even have one maybe on the passenger side or in the back seats too. Some of the other really common things out there today are what are called assisted driving systems. So things that

break the car automatically or are keeping you in the lane. A lot of cars today also come with apps. You can start them remotely through an app. Some cars have rain sensing windshield wipers. So there's sort of a lot of tech throughout the cabin, threaded throughout the car that is designed for a very convenient and comfortable driving experience. But you're reporting that many drivers are saying the smart tech in cars is too much.

Yeah, I was looking at some interesting survey data from a market research firm called Strategic Vision, and they look at how people feel about all sorts of different aspects of their cars. And the one that really stuck out to me is just that over the past decade,

10 years, the percentage of people who say that they feel positively about how intuitive the controls of their car are, it fell from 79% in 2015 to 56% last year. And there's this sort of like similar drop if you ask people about how they feel about the dashboard displays and the screen interfaces in their car. There are a bunch of kind of tech-related things where people have not been feeling quite as great. So what are some of the specific critiques that drivers have had?

One critique is that some of this is just all too much. They want to be able to just do simple stuff like turn on the AC in their car and not have to tap a touchscreen a few different times while taking their eyes off the road. A lot of this technology is actually quite great when it works really well. And in general, people actually want stuff in their cars. The problem is that a lot of it's just hard to use and often difficult.

breaks down. There are all these ways in which tech can make things better when they work, but when they don't, it is a real nuisance to a lot of people. How are car companies reacting to some of this, you know, consumers not liking the super duper smart car so much? Some are continuing to put a lot of bells

bells and whistles into cars. And they are not incorrect in thinking that a lot of people do want this stuff. But a few have moved some of the controls of a car back out of a touchscreen and into physical knobs and buttons. And one important thing coming up is

in this department is that there's a vehicle safety testing organization in Europe called Euro NCAP. And starting next year, they're going to start saying that cars are safer if they move certain basic controls back to physical places instead of using a touchscreen. So are touchscreens going to go away? No, but there are certain ways in which maybe the pendulum is swinging back towards pushing stuff and twisting stuff. That was our reporter, Joe Pinsker.

Coming up, advertisers are grappling with the tradeoffs of AI-powered ad planning and buying tools. Can they let go and just trust the algorithm? That's after the break. With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply.

Big tech platforms are moving towards more automation and sales. AI tools from companies like Google and Meta could make ad campaigns more efficient, according to their developers.

And while many marketers use these tools, they have mixed feelings about some of the trade-offs. Our reporter Patrick Coffey covers marketing and advertising, and he joins us now with more. All right, Patrick, what are these AI-powered ad planning and buying tools? How do they work? They basically make decisions on behalf of advertisers. In 2021, Google released a product called Performance Maxx.

and essentially allows advertisers to go into Google's ad platform, make a couple of decisions like how much money they want to spend, and perhaps most importantly, their sales goals for the campaign or click-through goals. And then they essentially press go and let the campaign run by itself. And the AI makes decisions on behalf of the advertiser like where they think the ad should run,

what kinds of consumers it thinks the ad should target, and in some cases, though not necessarily Google, what the final ad even looks like. A year after Google, Meta also released their own AI suite of tools called Advantage Plus. Since then, they've done all kinds of variations on it. And also within the last year, Amazon, TikTok, Pinterest, Yahoo have all rolled out similar tools.

analysts think that any company that can release this kind of tool is going to do it because it helps them make more money on their advertising. How is that so different from how these plans are put together without these AI-powered tools? Usually advertisers do it manually, as Google and Meta say, where they make all the decisions. They say, this is the platform or website I want my ads to run on. This is the exact consumer group that I want to target.

This is the amount that I want to spend, etc. But now the AI makes a lot of those decisions on behalf of the advertiser. And perhaps most importantly, in a lot of cases, the advertiser can't see what decisions the AI makes.

What have advertisers said about this sort of lack of control? A lot of them have sort of accepted it with complaints, grumbles. A lot of them don't like it at all. A number of large advertisers have declined to use the AI products altogether. Because, for example, if they're in restricted categories like alcohol, they don't trust the algorithms to ensure that their ads don't run on alcohol.

pages targeting children or YouTube accounts that children watch. And some of them are just not comfortable not knowing exactly where the ads run. How is all of this going to change marketers' jobs? Essentially, they have to, as one ad buyer told me, relinquish control and trust the algorithm to some degree. And a lot of them are just not comfortable doing that because over the last decade plus, ad

As we've had more and more platforms and more and more ways to reach consumers, their response has been, OK, but we spend so much money that we want to have more control over where our ads run and what they look like and who they target. And now they're essentially being asked to back off by the biggest tech companies that control the ad market. What are some of the benefits of these tools from a marketing perspective?

The pro from marketers is they essentially say, we don't really care where our ads go or what the AI does as long as our sales go up. And in some cases, they certainly do.

In other cases, the automation allows them to spend less time setting up the campaign and more time going back and figuring out what the art should look like and trying other platforms like, oh, should we run ads on Reddit, etc. Patrick, you reported that some marketers now call Google and Meta's AI tools black boxes because of the potential lack of transparency.

What have Google and Meta said about their AI tools? They've both said that the response has been overwhelmingly positive, that they designed all these in advertisers' interest, and that there are, within the platforms, choices that advertisers can make before the AI takes over.

And another important point is that the majority of ad revenue for these big tech companies comes from small businesses, comes from mom and pop shops who buy ads on Facebook. And they're not really advanced enough to think about all these details. So it's helpful to them to be able to just set it and forget it. And that's also good for Facebook because it makes it more likely that they're going to spend more money on the ads.

In addition to marketers, what other jobs are affected by this? It's also the jobs at the tech companies because, in a way, they have less need for salespeople to interact directly with advertisers because they can have customer service people. But a lot of times, there's really no one to guide the advertiser. They just kind of have to work the platform themselves and then, again, trust the algorithm to do what's best. That was our reporter, Patrick Coffey.

And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter with supervising producer Catherine Millsap. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply.