Alfie Lagos, Director & Founder, Lexlab
The media industry has always been built on a fundamental tension between creativity and certainty. Creative lead agencies focus on big thinking and breakthrough strategies.
Performance teams focus on execution and delivery. Modern agencies attempt to bridge both worlds, but there’s a problem: the platforms are making this harder, not easier.
Meta’s Advantage+, Google’s Performance Max, and similar automated solutions promise to make campaign management “easier,” but actually make it harder to know what’s really happening with your clients’ money.
The black boxes are getting blacker, and this opacity comes at a significant cost, not just financially, but creatively.
I recently spoke on a panel about “fighting the algorithm”, and my core premise was simple: platforms, algorithms and AI don’t work for you OR the brands you represent; they work for themselves to make the most money for their shareholders, so they cannot ultimately be held accountable for lack of performance.
It’s on us as humans to understand this fact and how we can, therefore, augment our critical thinking with this reality. You can’t simply blame Advantage+ or PMAX when your ad campaign stops performing.
Yet the platforms are pushing everyone toward the same automated solutions. The same creative formats. The same bidding strategies. And suddenly, the creativity agencies are known for get squeezed into smaller and smaller boxes. The industry is sliding towards a grey, samey centre with very limited transparency or control.
The performance teams’ job has become forcing budgets to certain cohorts to get proper tests and then benchmark against other strategies. Creativity sometimes needs human persuasion despite the certainty that low CPAs and CPCs can bring. But even that process is becoming harder as the platforms restrict the levers available for manual intervention.
Meanwhile, the talent market for performance specialists has become a revolving door. Good people reach a certain level, decide they want to be “managers”, and suddenly you’re back to square one. This creates an impossible choice for agencies: keep performance in-house and accept inconsistent results when talent churns, hand it to a traditional performance agency and lose the creative edge, or worse, let the platforms run on autopilot and watch creativity die.
Here’s the real tension: when certainty feels uncertain, creativity suffers. When you’re worried about whether campaigns are actually working, you can’t focus on making them special. The fragmentation of the market compounds this problem. More platforms, more placement options, and more variables, all wrapped in increasingly opaque automated systems.
The platforms want homogenisation because it’s easier to scale. Feed everything into the machine, let the algorithm sort it out, and trust that the black box will optimise towards whatever goal you’ve set. But effective advertising has never been about easy. It’s been about understanding your audience, your message, and the mechanics of delivery well enough to make all three work together.
What we’re losing isn’t just control. It’s knowledge. When specialists can’t see what’s happening inside these automated systems, they can’t learn from them. They can’t identify why something worked or didn’t work. They can’t apply those insights to the next campaign. The feedback loop that makes performance specialists valuable is being severed.
So what’s the answer?… Roll up those sleeves and get your hands dirty!
It’s cheaper than ever to start your own website, import something from Alibaba that you’re interested in, and market the shit out of it. Run your own campaigns. Start a side hustle. Hell, we’re in media, we should be able to do this better than most. The only way to truly understand what these platforms are doing is to feel it yourself, with your own money on the line, watching your own conversions tick over or not.
I’ve really been enjoying helping colleagues with exactly this. There’s something so satisfying about running a campaign when it’s your own product, your own budget, your own risk. You start to see where the automation wants to pull you, where it’s making decisions that don’t align with what you know about your audience. You learn to call bullshit on the platforms.
That hands-on knowledge is what lets you turn the light on inside the black boxes. Not completely, but enough. Enough to know when Advantage+ is serving your ads to the wrong people. Enough to recognise when PMAX is burning budget on placements that will never convert. Enough to intervene with confidence, rather than hope.
If you’ve got technical knowledge in this space, use it to help your fellow marketers see through the opacity. The platforms are counting on most people not understanding what’s happening under the hood. Every person who actually does understand makes the industry a little less grey, a little less samey, a little more able to push back.
The black boxes are getting blacker, but we don’t have to accept the darkness. We just need to be willing to do the work to understand them and hold them accountable.