• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Today

OpenAI and Anthropic are newcomers supporting smaller brands, similar to the way Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms grew vast advertising businesses by giving small companies the ability to build and run their own ad campaigns.

Generative AI now hands those same businesses the creative power and optimization tools of a full-service Madison Avenue agency.

There's a shift underway in the organic optimization and media-buying industries. While there have always been smaller SEO agencies, independent consultants, and boutique media buyers, the trend has accelerated with the introduction of AI.

It could be called a cottage industry of smaller companies helping other smaller companies using AI to optimize content and organize media buys. 

Robert Nance, founder and AI marketing consultant at the small agency Push AI Marketing, has been providing search engine optimization (SEO) and digital advertising services since 2011.

AI has given him a bigger opportunity to support all types of business, from small local companies to large national brands.

“The biggest change is how much more thoroughly we can work on each account,” Nance told MediaPost. “Tasks that were previously too time-consuming to fit within a client’s budget are becoming practical.”

Over the past couple of months, Push AI Marketing expanded its client programs to include generative engine optimization (GEO) with the goal of improving their visibility in AI-generated answers alongside traditional search results.

Nance estimates his small agency produces “roughly five times the work while investing about 25% more time overall” because the agency can address more options for clients.

“These figures describe our estimated workload and output, rather than a measured increase in client revenue or marketing results,” he said, adding that has tried AI tools from Grok, Claude, Meta and others.

Meta Platforms now offers the agentic AI agent Muse, with new capabilities especially designed for small businesses, to automate daily workloads.

“Muse for Small Business,” released last week, can connect with Facebook Pages, Instagram professional accounts and Meta ad accounts, as well as third-party platforms such as Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Canva, Slack, Klaviyo and Zoom.

Companies can use Muse to analyze sales and marketing performance, create growth plans, improve ads and content, review financial performance and handle routine administrative tasks. Meta said actions such as publishing, sending or spending still require user approval, but the platform is free for many of the functions it offers. Additional capabilities are available through subscription services.

Meta wants to integrate AI into all of its platforms to help small businesses operate rather than limit them AI functions and ad creation. The company is connecting Muse directly with a across social accounts, advertising data, storefronts, financial systems and productivity applications. 

It also released a nationwide TV ad campaign that features its Muse animated character performing various tasks, such as scheduling events, operating smart home features, and registering a user's child for fall sports. The ads also feature Muse researching and ordering school supplies, with many different versions.

The Motley Fool reported that not everyone was favorable about the commercials, with some saying it made the product appear too similar to Amazon's Alexa and didn't fully capture what makes Muse different.

There's no denying that as Meta has rapidly shifted to national TV ads, a major shift is taking place to reach smaller companies with the same services as larger agencies. 

Companies like Kargo, an advertising platform that combines creative and media, launched a self-serve agentic media-buying platform built for smaller businesses in general availability. The idea behind “Karlo” is to lower the barrier to entry and provide smaller companies the resources they have historically lacked.

Karlo has two features. “Creative Science,” which is supported by decades of proprietary cross-platform performance data, and “Media Intelligence” that combines premium audience data with Kargo's contextual signals.

Small teams can use the platform to plan, create, and activate campaigns across the open web, connected (TV), and social from one system.