Optimization has been the golden promise of AI in advertising. From audience targeting and bid management to media buying and creative optimization, the industry’s first wave of AI investment has focused on helping campaigns perform better.
However, as digital advertising becomes more fragmented, campaign performance is no longer the primary challenge agencies face.
Modern campaigns are omnichannel – they span search, social, programmatic, retail media, direct buys, LLMs and walled gardens. And they are complex – planning, activation, reporting, optimization and reconciliation often happen across disconnected systems. Agencies spend enormous amounts of time coordinating data, workflows and decisions across the campaign life cycle.
The greatest near-term value of AI won’t come from optimizing individual campaign activities; it will come from coordinating complexity across channels, teams and workflows so agencies can move faster, operate more efficiently and scale more effectively.
Complexity is advertising’s defining challenge
The original digital advertising vision sought greater efficiency. Instead, every wave of innovation introduced new channels and new workflows. Advertisers now operate across more platforms than ever, which means more data, more tasks, more reporting environments and more optimization decisions.
The result is a coordination burden that continues to grow. Agencies spend the bulk of their time on relatively tedious tasks: gathering data from multiple systems, translating strategy into campaign objectives, launching campaigns across channels, managing reporting and reconciling results.
These heavily manual processes eat up time, resources and margin – and in the bigger picture, they’re hard limits on speed and scalability that impede business growth.
From task automation to workflow orchestration
The first generation of AI deployments focused on automating individual tasks, such as audience creation, copy generation, reporting and bid optimization. Those use cases create marginal value largely confined to individual workflows.
Increasingly, agencies are discovering a larger opportunity: applying AI across omnichannel campaign life cycles. Rather than automating isolated tasks, AI can help connect and accelerate planning, activation, optimization, reporting and operations.
We’re seeing customers use agentic AI tools in our Basis platform to move beyond task-specific automation and toward workflow orchestration.
Orchestration creates business value
While the first wave of advertising AI focused primarily on campaign performance, the next wave of AI is focused on business performance – not to simply do the same work faster but to fundamentally change agency economics:
- Better outcomes: More complete analysis, better-informed planning, automated allocation of ad spend, faster identification of opportunities and fewer manual errors.
- Greater efficiency: Less time spent gathering data, reconciling reports and coordinating workflows, and more time spent on strategy and client relationships.
- Better scalability: Agencies can support more clients/campaigns with the same resources, so growth becomes less constrained by operational overhead.
- Improved profitability: Reduced administrative burden and better utilization of resources create operational leverage to drive higher-margin growth.
Optimization helps campaigns perform better, while orchestration helps agencies perform better.
More than another “single pane of glass”
I acknowledge that the promise of a “unified advertising platform” has been dangled in front of agencies since digital advertising began. But historical unification efforts relied on consolidation: move data, workflows and execution into one platform that purports to do it all and do it better than specialized tools. Modern agencies can’t operate this way.
Agencies rely on dozens of specialized systems, from channel-specific (search, social, programmatic and retail media) to function-specific (analytics, finance, reporting).
Orchestration shouldn’t have to replace specialized systems, but rather synchronize across best-in-class systems that remain where they are. AI makes this practical in ways that were previously impossible.
New opportunities present familiar challenges
As agencies explore AI-powered omnichannel workflow orchestration, they have a choice to buy, build or partner. For organizations wading into this nascent ad tech category, some common themes are emerging:
- Data quality is critical: Workflow orchestration is only as good as the data feeding it. Moreover, bad data will quickly propagate across planning, activation, reporting and optimization. As AI influences more decisions, data quality and data governance become increasingly important.
- Interoperability is the expectation: The best-of-breed approach for building the tech stack is paramount. Workflow orchestration depends on systems being able to communicate with one another. Emerging interoperability standards and AI connectivity frameworks (e.g., MCP) are making it easier for systems to exchange information, coordinate actions and share context. Agencies want solutions that can connect existing tools rather than force-feed entirely new ecosystems.
- Activation remains the missing link: Many AI solutions can generate media recommendations, but far fewer can operationalize them with speed and scale. Strategy alone doesn’t launch campaigns – you need intelligence to move seamlessly into execution, optimization, reporting and financial workflows to realize value.
Advertising’s next competitive advantage
For much of digital advertising’s history, competitive advantage came from access to media. More recently, it came from optimization – but now, virtually every major platform offers AI-powered targeting, bidding and automation.
The next competitive advantage will come from orchestration: connecting strategy, planning, execution, reporting and decision-making across the campaign life cycle and across media channels.
Dominating the AI arms race over the next few years won’t happen with the largest armament of AI tools. Winning organizations will be the ones that use AI to orchestrate across their business, transforming disconnected workflows into a coordinated system that moves faster, adapts more effectively and scales more efficiently.
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