Prompt-driven campaigns are coming from Google, OpenAI and Meta. Google and Meta still keep a human in the loop. OpenAI’s vision goes much further.
Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmueller compare three very different visions for prompting campaigns, and ask whether campaigns still have a right to exist.
Google has pitched a conversational way to build campaigns since Google Marketing Live 2023. Its latest step is AI Brief, now in closed beta for AI Max. You tell the AI in your own words how you position your brand, which searches you don’t want and what messaging to avoid. The hosts see it as a new control layer on top of automation, with the expert still in the loop.
OpenAI is aiming much further. In a recent interview, Asad Awan, who leads monetization at OpenAI, described campaigns that advertisers prompt into being, with the structure created underneath. His question, “Is campaign an important thing?”, gets a strong reaction here: every control you have sits in the campaign.
So what would a world without campaigns look like? Picture Performance Max taken to the extreme: a budget, a goal, and ads generated on the fly. The hosts argue retailers, agencies and in-house teams won’t accept it, because when performance drops there’s nothing left to diagnose or change.
Meta’s Muse for Small Business, launched in late September, already drafts campaigns from a goal. But nothing publishes or spends without the owner’s approval.
💡 Key Takeaways
Prompting a campaign isn’t a new idea. Google has pitched it since Google Marketing Live 2023. What differs now is how far each platform wants to take it.
Google’s AI Brief lets you guide AI Max on messaging, matching and audience in plain language. It’s in closed beta, starting with AI Max for Search, and Google has named Performance Max and AI Max for Shopping as next.
OpenAI’s monetization lead sees the campaign as a control layer that could be built automatically under a prompt. The “final frontier” is one prompt that handles the rest.
Campaigns aren’t low-level units. They’re where your controls sit. Take them away and you lose the reference points you need when something goes wrong.
Prompting sounds easy, but it’s hard to know what to change in a prompt when results drop.
Meta’s Muse for Small Business drafts campaigns from a goal, but nothing publishes or spends without the owner’s approval.
🔗 Resources & Links
Our Meta Muse episode (EP56): https://youtu.be/c-iFFlCUkpw
Mobile Dev Memo podcast, OpenAI’s advertising ambitions (with Asad Awan): https://mdm.co/podcast-openais-advertising-ambitions-with-asad-awan/
smec (Smarter Ecommerce): https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
smec on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Mike Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeryanretail/
Christian Scharmüller on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-scharm%C3%BCller/
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