AI can help media planning, but only if you fix workflows and keep planners
Opinion | The Future of Planning, Strategy and Innovation Week in Focus
Agencies should sand down the rough edges that slow the campaign lifecycle, Converge’s CEO writes. It’ll ensure the efficiencies delivered by AI-augmented planners translate into greater effectiveness, backed by irreplaceable human judgement.
AI can lend a hand in every stage of the media planning process. An agent can interpret a client brief and identify inventory that matches their objectives. It can crunch performance data to show what happened in the past and predict what might happen in the future. It can package it all into a ready-to-activate plan.
The mistake is treating these functions as a means to replace media planners rather than augment them. Automation makes processes more efficient, but efficiency without effectiveness just means spinning wheels faster without them touching the ground.
Planning is about marshalling consumer intelligence, understanding the client’s business and deciding what matters. Strategy means choosing what does and doesn’t get included, and why. It involves acting on changing data, challenging assumptions and championing the customer and the brand throughout the process. AI can support those decisions, but it isn’t strategy.
AI can help planners challenge assumptions by revealing patterns in the data they would never otherwise see and unlock previously inaccessible opportunities. It can solve complex problems at scale that human planners couldn’t tackle on their own, such as making sense of difficult-to-buy inventory and opening up identity-free environments.
The planner brings the wider strategic context, applies critical judgement, and ensures the client’s interests are represented in the decisions that follow. The trading team then has the crucial role of turning that strategy into action.
Effectiveness comes through the interplay between a planner and AI, and between a planner and the rest of their team. It’s here where even the most AI-savvy planner hits roadblocks. Neither people nor AI are great at alignment. A media planner could have the most fantastic machine in the world that does everything they want at the click of a button, but it doesn’t matter if someone downstream in the execution process is still waiting for the creative asset they need.
Then at activation, there needs to be an equally fantastic machine that can speak to the planner to confirm where and how many ads were served, and whether they were seen.
The problem is everyone is figuring out AI in silos. They might become incredibly efficient at their task, but that efficiency is occurring in isolation. The potential gains in effectiveness are being lost in the gaps between client and agency, agency and media, and between departments within each organisation.
Campaign progress can hit gridlock over creative approvals, finance sign-offs, and misaligned tracking logic. Research from Optimizely shows that 60% of UK marketers still launch campaigns without enough time or data to optimise them properly. AI will continue to deliver efficiency rather than effectiveness until fractured workflows are repaired and clients are directly aligned with planners, and planners with buyers.
And while agencies make stop-and-start progress toward AI integration, walled gardens are leveraging their closed systems and machine-learning muscle to edge media planners out.
Walled gardens are betting against people, and they won’t win
Google’s Ask Advisor and Amazon’s agentic tools are designed to allow advertisers to create media plans without any outside input.
This presents a special risk because planning’s value gets lost when media becomes an industrialised exercise in packaging and selling inventory. The more the platforms absorb the planning function into their systems, the greater the risk that the consumer intelligence, strategic thinking and client advocacy that sit behind good planning get squeezed out of the process.
Agencies are stuck with the devil they know. They still have to pour client budgets into walled gardens, not necessarily because they want to, but because if they don’t, their competitor will. These same agencies are also building their own AI capabilities to keep pace with walled gardens.
The more immediate disruption, however, may happen closer to home. AI can already take on many of the repetitive and analytical tasks that have sat with entry-level media executives. The answer doesn’t have to be removing those people. The role can be reformulated, with media executives contributing in different ways as agency businesses themselves change.
Should agencies fear the end times? No, because they have the people, and people have always differentiated one company from the next.
Picture the future Big Tech envisions: brand agents talk directly with walled-garden agents, and everything is automated. How does Coca-Cola differentiate from Pepsi? How long do consumers bombarded by identical campaigns continue to pay attention?
As AI capabilities become increasingly commoditised, and every brand has access to broadly similar intelligence, relying on this to construct the media mix means decisions will inevitably be lost in a soup of mediocrity.
Competitive advantage comes from what people do with the intelligence, the questions they ask, the choices they make and the context they bring to those decisions.
The power then returns to those with the best people, those who can recognise when to zig when everyone else zags, who can apply real-world experience, be struck by inspiration, and forge bonds with their clients and media partners.
That human contribution starts with the planner’s ability to decide what the data means in the context of the customer and the brand, and to make the strategic choices that follow.
While walled gardens seek to automate planners out of the equation, agencies should instead focus on sanding down the rough edges that slow down the campaign lifecycle. This ensures the efficiencies delivered by AI-augmented planners filter through to greater campaign effectiveness, backed by irreplaceable human judgement.
Targeting genuine friction across the planning lifecycle remains the crucial benchmark. By keeping human planners firmly at the centre to exercise judgment, maintain guardrails, and secure stakeholder alignment, agencies ensure that automated power translates into meaningful brand success.
Walled gardens are enticing advertisers with the promise of doing more with less, but agencies can show the power of doing more with more.
Ian Maxwell is the CEO of Converge