The AI That Told a Brand to Raise the Budget It Just Cut

I've been on Jason Smith's show, The Truth About Social Ads, three times now. Jason runs Spotlight Social Advertising and he runs his client accounts on Wicked Reports, so he doesn't ask soft questions. He asked what changed in the platform. The honest answer starts with an AI that gave terrible advice.

The budget story

We spent close to two years testing AI on attribution data. The potential was obvious. The problem was just as obvious. AI doesn't like unknowns, it always sounds confident and it tells you you're right.

Here's the simplest version of what went wrong. A brand was spending a lot on ads that weren't working, so they cut the budget. Then the delayed conversions landed. Clicks from the week before converted a couple of days later and ROAS suddenly looked amazing. The AI saw great ROAS and said raise the spend.

They had just cut it. The improvement wasn't from anything new. It was old clicks finishing their journey. Any media buyer would spot that in seconds. The AI couldn't.

That was the easy one to explain. There were plenty of deeper ones that caused a lot more drama. 

Listen to my conversation with Jason about this here or watch the full episode.