How Virgin Money and mFuse are unlocking a competitive edge with autonomous AI

That’s changing. Autonomous AI represents a structural shift from systems that optimize after the fact to intelligence that interprets, decides and acts in the moment. It empowers marketers to focus on creativity and long-term strategy.

Data shows that autonomous advertising, like Quantcast’s Audience by Q, drives measurable results. Users of Audience by Q are seeing a median 58% improvement in performance on their campaigns (based on 470 ad sets run during the beta release).

But aggregated numbers only tell part of the story. The fundamental transformation lies in how marketers are using AI to unlock performance. Two organizations at the forefront of this shift, Virgin Money and its agency partner mFuse, are proving what’s possible when AI stops being a buzzword and starts becoming a competitive edge.

The AI advantage: Performance with strategic headroom

For many marketers, the promise of AI isn’t just better performance; it’s reclaiming focus.

“As a long-time Quantcast customer, we’ve always trusted the platform to deliver results,” said Will Morris, senior media and SEO manager at Virgin Money. “Being early adopters of Audience by Q has been a game-changer for our business. The AI-driven audience optimization handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes, freeing our agency team to focus on strategic tasks while we reap the rewards of improved performance.”

By simplifying workflows, teams can now focus on forward-looking strategy. “Since implementing Audience by Q, we’ve already seen improvements of up to 44% in campaign performance versus the traditional methods, proving that autonomous intelligence delivers tangible business results. Quantcast continues to set the standard for what a modern advertising platform should deliver,” Morris said.

Virgin Money’s experience reflects a broader industry shift: As AI evolves from automation to autonomy, marketers are rethinking not just how campaigns run, but how marketing organizations operate.

That sentiment is echoed by Virgin Money’s agency partner, mFuse, which has experienced a similar transformation in its approach to performance activation. Kostas Lazopoulos, performance activation director at mFuse, said, “Audience by Q seems to be a game changer for our campaigns. We’ve noticed significant performance improvement shortly after enabling this autonomous audience builder, and Quantcast has been a consistently reliable and proactive partner in guiding our team through our shift from traditional to modern campaign building.”

This marks a critical turning point in performance marketing: AI isn’t a replacement for expertise, but an accelerator of it. Less iterating, more forward-thinking.

The power of audience understanding

Most demand-side platforms differentiate based on inventory reach. Yet in a landscape where every platform claims to offer scale, reach alone is no longer a meaningful advantage. Scale without precision only adds noise. What marketers need is the ability to reach audiences, but also understand them; to interpret intent, context and relevance as they happen.

What defines real intelligence is the context in which decisions are made. Most platforms still rely on fragmented, delayed or incomplete signals, reacting to what has already happened rather than what’s happening now. Audience intelligence relies on understanding behavior in real time, and the ability to model that behavior in depth and at speed is what separates advanced systems from traditional approaches.

AI alone cannot deliver this. It needs a foundation of rich, real-time data; signals that reveal who an audience is and what they’re interested in at that exact moment. That’s where autonomous systems begin to create measurable differentiation, identifying high-value buyers that other platforms overlook and turning live intent into immediate opportunity.

Mechanics vs. momentum

When AI automates the grind, the question becomes: What should marketers do with their resources? For teams like Virgin Money and mFuse, the answer lies in three areas:

• Strategy over setup. With AI generating custom models, optimizing bids and evaluating millions of signals, teams focus on shaping the broader media strategy rather than constantly reconstructing campaigns.

• Creativity and narrative development. Marketers gain more time for storytelling, building messaging frameworks and testing creative ideas, rather than wrestling with the mechanics of activation.

• Innovation and experimentation. Autonomous systems enable faster test-and-learn cycles. Marketers validate hypotheses quickly, deepen their understanding of audiences and innovate rather than react.
  

In short, AI takes over the mechanics so humans can take over the momentum.

AI as a partner, not a replacement

A recurring theme across Virgin Money and mFuse is trust — not blind trust in AI, but trust earned through transparency, performance and control.

Performance marketers don’t want to surrender expertise. They want a system that extends it. Autonomous advertising learns continuously, adapts instantly, frees teams from operational drag, unlocks audiences others can’t see and compounds performance over time.

What Virgin Money and mFuse demonstrate is that autonomous AI is now a commercial reality, reshaping how performance marketers work, think and grow.

The industry is moving beyond manual optimization and algorithmic guesswork to a world where real intelligence, rooted in deep audience understanding, real-time signals and genuine autonomy, becomes the foundation of competitive edge.

The question is no longer whether AI will change marketing; it’s how quickly the best marketers will adapt to lead with it.

Partner insights from Quantcast