D+ Research: Marketers embrace AI for social and retail media, but show skepticism in AI ad buying

And while some marketers are readily handing more of their workflows over to AI — including automating ad buying and generating creative — a consensus on how to most effectively, and thoughtfully, use AI has yet to emerge.

Marketers opt to use AI for data analysis, content creation in social and retail media

With marketers under pressure to do more with less, there is extra scrutiny on channels to be measurable and performance-driven. Incorporating AI tools into their workflows allows marketers to speed up turnaround times and analyze data more deeply, even with limited bandwidth.

Among those marketers using AI in their social media campaigns, two-thirds (67%) are using it to analyze results and data. More than half use AI to create content (57%) and edit content (54%).

Major platforms are increasingly focused on creating infrastructure to enable AI agents to do the tedious, operational work of running campaigns. For instance, social media giant Meta has recently opened its ad ecosystem to third-party AI tools. These connectors will enable several capabilities, including supporting cross-channel insights and campaign management. More recently, TikTok opened its ads platform to AI agents with its new model context protocol (MCP) server and developer toolkit, aimed at automating campaign creation, management and optimization.

“We feel AI APIs for real-time analysis of performance and creative testing will be valuable over time,” Tucker Matheson, co-founder and co-CEO of Markacy, previously told Digiday.

Generative AI is also having a significant impact on the creator economy. A growing subset of creators is using AI in place of creative teams, with some even using agentic tools and generative AI to spur engagement by speaking to fans through their DMs across social platforms such as Instagram. Brands such as Sony Pictures and Universal Pictures are using AI platforms to help launch digital channels and drive engagement, proving that more marketers are integrating generative AI into their workflows.

Agencies of all sizes are also relying on AI tools for creator discovery. For several months, independent influencer agency Later has used an AI system that matches campaign briefs with influencers and models the potential performance of social content based on historic engagement data. “That’s a much richer picture that gives me confidence that I’m going to get a high ROAS on my campaign,” Scott Sutton, CEO of Ladder, told Digiday.

Our Digiday+ Research survey found similar trends among the 42% of marketers using AI in retail media campaigns.

The majority (73%) are using AI to analyze the results and data of these campaigns, followed by creating content (68%) and editing content (45%). Marketers are also using AI for adjacent activities, such as connecting off-site and on-platform results for analysis (36%) and hyper-personalizing ad visuals (32%).

Most marketers don’t trust AI agents with ad budgets — yet

However, as AI gets woven more deeply into campaign planning and activation, marketers are still hesitant to hand over the purse strings to agentic tools. Among the minority of marketers using AI in their campaigns, only 32% use it to buy social media or retail media inventory.

Despite buyer reluctance around using AI, the sell side isn’t showing the same hesitation. As reported by Digiday, major players in the retail media space, including Walmart and Amazon, are embracing agentic solutions for their ad platforms.

However, during Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit (DPMS) earlier this month, several marketers spoke about establishing guardrails to keep agents in check over concerns about budgets, data management, transparency and decisioning.

“We do put guardrails from a spending perspective to ensure it doesn’t conflict with our decisioning or how we want the campaigns to perform,” said Glenniss Richards, senior director of digital media activation at Bayer, at DPMS. 

“I want a person overseeing the bot,” she added. “We do need some guardrails in place to ensure that we are still able to test and learn and scale new opportunities.”

Some buyers have come out in support of using agents to assist with media planning and campaign setup, while arguing against autonomous buying.

“Agentic buying tools could improve transparency around repetitive execution tasks, but there’s real risk they could also obscure critical decision-making if advertisers rely too much on AI for bidding, optimization and performance assessment without human oversight,” Amy Porter, svp and executive director of digital media at RPA, told Digiday. “The future likely isn’t fully autonomous media buying, but instead it could be AI augmenting operational workflows while experienced practitioners remain responsible for strategy, judgment and accountability.”