• by Jeremy Hull , Yesterday

Brainlabs’ Chief Solutions Officer writes, “As we work through the AI-driven evolution of consumer behavior, success is still rooted in the core purpose of advertising: reaching the right people and influencing their actions.”

It’s fun to outsmart a digital advertising platform. I’m not talking about anything illicit or illegal. I’m talking about the clever little adjustments you can make as a nerd who’s deeply immersed in the nuances of Google Ads, Meta Ads, ChatGPT, DV360, etc. These intricate tweaks range from cascading negatives to granular geo-segmentation to imposing device and OS splits and beyond, Tricks, hacks, secret techniques: call them what you will, digital marketers have been discovering, leveraging, and arguing about them for over two decades.

The important thing to remember about these clever hacks is that they are additive, not foundational. As we work through the AI-driven evolution of consumer behavior, success is still rooted in the core purpose of advertising: reaching the right people and influencing their actions.

Yes, this is an article about going back to the fundamentals. But before you tell your AI agent to skip ahead to the next item in your content queue, consider how often you actually review your campaigns with these fundamentals in mind.

Clean, focused conversion data feeding the machine of automation is mandatory. Review the success signals you’re feeding into each platform and ask yourself whether they’re actually the consumer actions that are driving your business today. You should absolutely track as many KPIs as you can, but all too often I’ll audit an account and see an utter mess of conflicting performance signals cluttering and confusing the in-platform optimization AI. Maybe driving newsletter signups mattered to someone six months ago, but do you still have them weighted equally with actual conversions? Clean up those signals and you’ll see immediate improvement.

Rich, optimized site content written for the customer matters more than ever. It powers targeting tactics like Google’s AI Max and, mark my words, will be proven as one of the major performance levers for ChatGPT Ads.LLM conversations have reshaped the upper funnel into two key types of advertising opportunity: problem/solution (“Why are my feet sore after I run?”) or inspiration (“Tell me about the best vacation spots in west Texas”). Create content that clearly answers consumer needs and you’ll drastically increase the chances of your brand showing up in the LLM’s answer and in ads placed alongside it. Also, don’t neglect your product or location data feeds. Use all available fields to share specific information so the LLMs know when to recommend your brand and how to purchase or book, because agentic shopping has already shifted from a futuristic dream to the present reality.

The winning brands are making more ad creative than ever, using in-platform and third party AI to produce thousands of ad variations. In a world where consumers have been trained to expect incredibly personalized answers, a single basic “catch-all” call-to-action won’t cut it. Google and ChatGPT are frantically testing how to place ads in AI experiences without feeling disruptive, and you can bet the answer will involve advertisers letting the platforms customize each ad to maximize its relevance to the AI-generated answer surrounding it.

AI has disrupted every aspect of digital advertising, and it’s tempting to chase the next clever hack. The brands and agencies that win over the next six months will balance innovation with a relentless commitment to the fundamentals. Nail that and you’ll set yourself up for sustained success that you can compound with those incredibly nerdy little tricks (that I can’t wait to debate with you at a future advertising conference)!

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