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Campagnes

Ce que l’IA signifie vraiment pour le marketing de performance

Mohamed Hamad
Mohamed Hamad
Campagnes
5 mins read
août 11, 2025
  • WunderLand
  • Campagnes
  • Ce que l’IA signifie vraiment pour le marketing de performance

Table of Contents

  • From manual control to machine-informed strategy
  • Behavioural targeting beats audience profiling
  • Creative strategy still matters (maybe more than ever)
  • Human accountability doesn’t go away
  • What to prioritize now
  • AI doesn’t eliminate the need for performance marketers. It just changes what they’re good at.

How paid media teams are evolving and what it takes to stay effective

AI is not coming for performance marketing. It’s already here.

Most marketers have been working with machine learning for years, whether they realized it or not. Google Ads, Meta’s delivery algorithms, dynamic creative testing, predictive bidding, these tools have been shaping media outcomes for the better part of a decade.

What has changed is scale, visibility, and expectation. What was once a silent feature embedded in the platform is now a defining force in campaign performance. As AI becomes more central to how media is bought, optimized, and reported on, performance marketers need to shift more than just their tools. They need to shift their thinking.

From manual control to machine-informed strategy

For years, high-performing marketers made their name by mastering details: slicing audiences into microsegments, adjusting bids manually, A/B testing creative with precision. These were skills born of a time when human decision-making was the engine of media performance.

Today, AI handles most of that. Platforms can build and test dozens of creative combinations automatically. They can optimize for conversions across campaigns without requiring a single bid adjustment. They can shift spend mid-flight based on real-time performance signals.

The role of the marketer is no longer to control every lever. It’s to shape the system.

That means:

  • Structuring campaigns in a way that gives the algorithm the best chance to learn
  • Feeding the machine with clean, consistent, and strategically aligned data
  • Thinking in terms of feedback loops, not one-time launches

The best marketers now focus less on what they’re executing and more on how the system interprets their inputs.

Watch the Webinar

Navigating AI in Performance Marketing

Mohamed Hamad août 1, 2025
Marketing
Webinars
The days of micromanaging every bid and budget are over. AI now makes many campaign decisions faster and more efficiently than humans can. But where does that leave performance marketers?
Watch Now

Behavioural targeting beats audience profiling

One of the most significant shifts AI has brought is the move away from demographic targeting and toward behavioural prediction.

Where marketers used to define audiences by age, income, location, or job title, AI now builds live profiles based on what people do. What content they engage with. How they navigate a website. What patterns they follow before converting.

This change reframes targeting strategy. Instead of asking, “Who do we think this product is for?” marketers now ask, “What behaviours signal readiness to act?”

It also changes how we think about segmentation. The focus moves from creating static personas to enabling dynamic learning. Audiences are not fixed lists, they are fluid systems that evolve with every click, view, or scroll.

Creative strategy still matters (maybe more than ever)

There’s a misconception that AI can optimize everything, including message and tone. But creative still drives performance. AI can test variations, but it can’t define your value proposition, set your brand voice, or align your campaign with customer pain points.

That’s why high-performing teams still invest heavily in strategy, positioning, and ideation. The difference is that now, those ideas must be expressed in a modular way.

Instead of producing one perfect ad, teams build flexible systems of assets: copy lines, images, headlines, offers. These components can be mixed, matched, and tested at scale. The result is faster learning, more responsive campaigns, and a more efficient path to creative-market fit.

Human accountability doesn’t go away

AI is a tool, not a scapegoat. If a campaign underperforms, it’s still on the marketing team to figure out why. That includes analyzing platform decisions, diagnosing data mismatches, rethinking the funnel, or reframing the offer.

Strategic oversight is more important than ever. With so much of the execution now automated, the real work of performance marketing has shifted to planning, interpretation, and optimization.

This also means the way we hire, train, and evaluate performance marketers needs to change. We need fewer micromanagers and more systems thinkers. People who can set conditions, guide learning, and identify where automation needs human reinforcement.

What to prioritize now

If you’re leading a performance marketing team, here’s where to focus:

  • Data discipline. Your CRM, pixel events, and conversion tracking must be clean, consistent, and tightly aligned with your actual business goals.
  • Creative flexibility. Build campaigns that can generate multiple versions of your message, not just one.
  • Full-funnel context. Don’t just optimize the ad. Understand what happens after the click and where friction is introduced.
  • Team upskilling. Shift your internal culture from platform tinkering to strategic orchestration.
  • Platform trust (with guardrails). Use AI’s strengths, but don’t abandon oversight. Set performance thresholds, test boundaries, and audit results regularly.

AI doesn’t eliminate the need for performance marketers. It just changes what they’re good at.

This is not a story about replacement. It’s a story about evolution.

The marketers who thrive in this new environment are the ones who know what to hand over to automation and what to keep human. They treat platforms as partners, not puzzles. They build campaigns that learn. And they stay close to the business goals that matter, even when the execution happens behind the scenes.

AI in performance marketing is not the end of creativity, or strategy, or craft. It’s a call to elevate all three.

FAQ

  • How is AI changing performance marketing?

    AI is automating tasks like audience targeting, bidding, and creative testing, allowing marketers to focus on strategy, data quality, and optimization.

  • Does AI replace performance marketers?

    No. AI enhances execution, but marketers are still essential for setting goals, shaping campaigns, and interpreting results.

  • What’s the difference between behavioural targeting and demographic targeting?

    Behavioural targeting uses real-time signals like browsing habits and engagement patterns, offering more accurate predictions than demographic data alone.

  • What skills do performance marketers need in the age of AI?

    Marketers now need strong data literacy, creative strategy, and systems thinking to guide AI tools and ensure campaigns align with business outcomes.

  • What is the role of a performance marketer in an AI-driven world?

    The role of a performance marketer has fundamentally shifted. Instead of spending your time on manual tasks like micromanaging bids and audiences, you’re now a strategist and system architect. AI handles the details, so you can focus on bigger-picture work: feeding the algorithm high-quality data, refining your creative, and building the campaigns that guide the AI toward success. Think of it as moving from a pilot to a flight controller.

  • How does AI impact creative strategy and development?

    AI is an incredible copilot for creative teams. It allows you to generate and test tons of assets, from copy to video, at a scale and speed that was impossible before. But here is the key: AI can’t replace the human heart behind your brand. Your authentic voice, your story and your value proposition are still what truly connect with people. AI just helps you find the most effective way to share it.

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Mohamed Hamad

Mohamed Hamad

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Fondateur et président de Third Wunder. Originaire d'Auckland, en Nouvelle-Zélande, et maintenant résident à Montréal, au Canada, il possède une formation en développement web, en conception UX et en marketing digital avec une expérience dans des startups, des organismes gouvernementaux et des agences à travers le monde. Il a un penchant pour les gadgets et les technologies révolutionnaires. Lorsqu'il ne change pas le monde en coulisses, Mohamed œuvre également comme photographe.
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