By Charles Lee Mathews. Marketing automation was supposed to free up strategists for higher-level thinking, but it’s doing the opposite. Today’s hyper-automated platforms create “black boxes” that leave marketers flying blind, optimising for speed over strategy and efficiency over actual effectiveness.
“There is an overemphasis on efficiency in automation, which is creating a generation of marketers who are overly focused on process and delivery over carefully thought-out work that delivers value,” Ryan Sauer, CEO of Redwood Analytics, tells MarkLives. “In some cases, the strategy becomes automated, and the algorithms create a ‘black box’ of effectiveness,” he adds.
The big problem with ‘black boxes’ is that they are opaque, and when stacked between systems, you can’t understand what’s going on, says Sauer. “There’s absolutely no way to reverse engineer effectiveness and replicate results. Data and insights inform strategy, and an understanding of measurement and cause is the foundation for insightful reports. Algorithms, while effective, are reducing strategic understanding,” he says.
How automation can blindside insight
Nicolas van Zyl, CEO at Naritive Global, agrees and offers an example to showcase this dilemma. “Google and Meta juggle a handful of competing interests, holding near-monopolies in the performance marketing industry. For the last decade, marketing automation has been their relentless focus. They need to deliver increasingly high-quality results to their clients (effectiveness) while simultaneously pulling as much spend as possible from advertisers (profit). To achieve this delicate balance, you’re seeing both companies increasingly transition back to what we call the ‘black box model’ in their solutions,” van Zyl says.
“Take Google’s Performance Max. For advertisers accustomed to previous levels of transparency, PMax felt like a regression. It was rolled out as a tool to ‘help’ achieve greater efficiency and more performance results at scale, but with hindsight, it’s clear it served as a Trojan horse. In the name of efficiency and automation, it actively clawed back transparency and, arguably, made human oversight and critical thinking redundant. If you can’t see what’s happening inside the box, how can you truly optimise for your business’s actual effectiveness, rather than the platform’s?” he asks rhetorically.
“Let’s not sugarcoat it: for many, what happens ‘under the hood’ of today’s hyper-automated platforms is, quite frankly, a mystery wrapped in an algorithm. Businesses, strategists, and buyers all know this. When we hand over too much control to algorithms, we risk losing the very essence of effective marketing: human insight, strategic agility, and true brand custodianship. Are automated platforms reducing marketers to passengers? Absolutely. That’s the very intention,” van Zyl says.
Mind the knowledge gap
“The brutal truth is that most media strategists are flying blind,” says Greer Hogarth, group media strategist at RAPT Creative. “There’s a massive ‘knowledge gap’ where teams understand campaign outcomes but have virtually no insight into the algorithmic mechanisms driving those results. Platforms like Google Performance Max epitomise this challenge — heavy automation with almost zero transparency into decision-making processes.
The programmatic supply chain remains frustratingly opaque around ad placement, budget flows, and the notorious ‘tech tax’ that intermediaries absorb before spend reaches publishers. When only 41% of programmatic budgets reach effective ad impressions, we’re not talking about minor inefficiencies; we’re looking at systemic transparency failures,” she says.
The statistic Hogarth cites comes from the ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, which found that $22 billion in open web ad spending could be allocated more effectively. The benchmark initiative aims to enhance accountability, responsibility, and efficiency in programmatic supply chains. The $22 billion represents an average 37.8% optimisation gap, with one-third of ad spending going toward impressions that don’t meet standard quality metrics.
“In South Africa, where 83% of advertising revenue will be generated through programmatic by 2029, this transparency deficit becomes particularly concerning. Local agencies are grappling with global platforms that offer limited visibility into how budgets flow through the complex supply chain, making it difficult to optimise for the South African market’s unique dynamics.
The industry is fighting back with solutions focused on ‘meaningful transparency’ rather than drowning strategists in unusable raw data. But let’s be honest, we’re still in the early stages of this transparency revolution,” she says.
Melanie Campbell, group MD at RAPT Creative, echoes this sentiment and talks about “sleepwalking into” the “relentless pursuit of performance”. She then asks a pertinent question: “Have we lost the plot?”
Fetishising numbers
“Marketers once obsessed over meaning, but now we fetishise metrics. We’ve built a world where the ‘how’ of advertising has devoured the ‘why’. We’ve mistaken speed for smarts. Yes, marketing automation can scale fast. But what if it’s optimising the wrong things, at scale?” Clicks, impressions, CPMs — vanity metrics dressed up as victory laps. While machines chase efficiency, is brand equity being left behind in the dust along with cultural connection and human resonance?
“Automation has made us faster and more efficient, but efficiency without effectiveness doesn’t drive growth,” says Lynette Naidoo, MD of Publicis Media. “We should be using automation to enhance outcomes that matter, not just activity. The real value lies in when automation supports human creativity and strategic thinking, helping us connect the dots between data and meaningful results for our clients.”
Automation’s burgeoning market
Marketing automation is a massive industry. Statista predicted that the global marketing automation industry’s revenue would be over $8 billion in 2024. That annual value was projected to more than double by 2032, surpassing $21 billion.
Campbell sums up the conundrum of the explosive growth of the marketing automation market with a powerful statement: “In the rush to go faster, we’re hitting the wrong targets harder. Automation was meant to liberate us, but too often it’s left us dumb, blind, and dangerously disconnected. Let’s interrogate the shiny algorithmic dream, and expose its inconvenient truths.”
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Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
