We recently watched a client's CPL drop 40% after switching to AI bidding.
Lead volume soared. CTR climbed. Learning stabilised quickly.
Their sales team was drowning in rubbish leads and close rates collapsed.
The CMO called me, frustrated.
But the AI was working perfectly.
It optimised exactly what we told it to; maximise lead volume at the lowest cost. The problem wasn't the technology. The problem was that we'd asked it to optimise towards the wrong outcome.
This happens more often than most marketers want to admit, as we wrote in our post 2 weeks ago: AI Is a Mirror, Not a Magic Wand
For years, skilled media buyers quietly protected businesses from their own flawed strategies.
They were the buffer. The interpreter. The correction engine.
A buyer might have been told to optimise for leads, but if they knew the sales team hated the quality, they course-corrected by gut instinct. They'd spend more on audiences that felt higher-quality. They'd push creative that appealed to the true buyer, not just the cheapest lead.
Humans quietly redefined the KPI in practice, even if the platform data didn't reflect it.
AI is ruthlessly literal. If you tell it "maximise leads," it will do exactly that, even if those leads are worthless to your business.
When AI removes that human override, you're suddenly looking at your actual strategy for the first time. And for many businesses, what they see isn't pretty.
The Three Questions That Expose the Real Problem
Before you blame your AI tools, ask yourself these three questions. These three questions cut straight to the root of 90% of AI-related underperformance.
1. Is the KPI I'm optimising for the same KPI the business truly values?
This is the killer question.
Most common mismatches we see at ADMATIC:
- Optimising for leads when the business cares about qualified leads
- Optimising for CPL when the business needs ROAS
- Optimising for clicks but caring about pipeline
- Optimising for application starts but caring about enrolments
If your KPI doesn't match business value, AI isn't failing. Your KPI architecture is.
2. Is the data I'm feeding AI clean, complete, and representative of true value?
AI's performance is capped by the quality of signals you feed it.
Before AI, human buyers could spot and compensate for broken tags, inflated events, duplicate conversions, and spam leads. AI can't. It trusts the data blindly.
If your data is flawed, AI is optimising to a distorted version of your business.
3. Is my structure designed for humans or for AI?
Most older account structures were built to support manual optimisation, many ad sets, narrow targeting, layered exclusions, and micro-segmentation.
AI hates this. It needs scale, simplicity, fewer constraints, and unified signals.
If your structure is wrong, AI will expose it immediately by performing badly in it.
How Brandformance Prevents This From Happening
At ADMATIC, we've built our entire approach around preventing the disconnect between what you measure and what your business actually needs.
"Traditional" performance marketing created a split: the official strategy lived in spreadsheets whilst the real strategy lived in buyers' heads. AI removed that safety net, exposing the gap.
Brandformance closes that gap before it can exist.
We start with a single strategic vision that connects brand building and performance activities. There's no "what the spreadsheet says" versus "what the human knows is true." One system. One objective. One truth.
We coordinate KPIs so a conversion metric cannot exist without its brand-health counterpart. Lower-funnel results are measured in context of upper-funnel impact. AI finally optimises for the real objective, not a proxy.
And we integrate planning so creative isn't made for brand or performance, it's made to do both. Media choices balance reach, recall, intent, and conversion potential. There's no hidden "real strategy" because it's baked into the planning itself.
The Uncomfortable Truth
When that CMO saw the cause-and-effect chain mapped out (legacy KPI into AI, interprets KPI, AI optimises, wrong users engaged, poor sales outcomes) she said something quite meaningful. "So the AI didn't break our system. It forced our system to be honest."
Exactly!
AI didn't create your strategic flaws. It just made them impossible to ignore. Ready to strengthen your media strategy and harness the full potential of AI enhanced advertising? Get in touch with an ADMATICian today to see how we can help.