AI Won’t Replace Marketers—It Will Replace Marketing Decisions: Bob Regular Talks AI Ad Fads

ICYMI: Bob Regular catches up with 10 Minute Martech on why AI’s biggest disruption isn&rsquot content creation—it&rsquos becoming the strategist behind every marketing decision.

“I think what’s really going to happen is it’s going to remove our role as the decision-maker.”

In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Bob Regular, CEO of Infolinks Media, joins host Sara Faatz to explore where artificial intelligence is taking digital marketing—and why most conversations are focused on the wrong things.

While much of the industry is fixated on AI-generated content, productivity gains and automation, Bob believes the real transformation is still ahead. From media buying and creative optimisation to the rise of AI assistants and the future of digital advertising, he argues that AI won’t simply help marketers work faster—it will fundamentally change who makes marketing decisions.

Bob’s Big Idea: AI Will Become Marketing’s Decision-Maker

Every major shift in marketing has changed how marketers work.

The internet introduced measurable advertising. Programmatic transformed media buying. Machine learning improved campaign optimisation.

Bob believes AI is different.

Rather than simply helping marketers execute campaigns more efficiently, AI is beginning to take ownership of the decisions themselves.

Instead of deciding which audiences to target, which channels to invest in or how campaigns should be optimized, marketers will increasingly define the business objective and allow AI to determine the best path to achieve it.

It’s a fundamental shift from being the operator to becoming the supervisor.

Bob compares it to autonomous driving. When self-driving technology first arrived, drivers watched every movement carefully, ready to intervene at any moment. As confidence in the technology increased, that role gradually shifted from active driver to someone simply overseeing the journey.

He believes marketing is heading in exactly the same direction.

Bob Regular’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech

1. AI Isn’t Another Marketing Trend

Digital marketing has chased plenty of fads over the years, but Bob sees AI as one of the industry’s genuine tectonic shifts—on the same level as the arrival of the internet itself.

2. Productivity Is Just the Entry Point

Better workflows, faster reporting and stronger analytics are valuable, but Bob believes these are simply table stakes. The real disruption begins when AI starts making strategic decisions.

3. Human Oversight Isn’t Going Away

Marketers won’t disappear from the process, but their role will evolve from actively managing campaigns to supervising increasingly autonomous AI systems.

4. Dynamic Creative Has Become Overhyped

Generating thousands of creative variations sounds exciting, but Bob questions whether marketers actually need unique creative for every individual—and whether it’s even statistically practical to test every permutation.

5. More Creative Doesn’t Mean Better Marketing

AI can generate unlimited creative assets, but success still depends on understanding audiences, making sound decisions and knowing what actually works.

6. AI Has Democratized Video Production

Video advertising is no longer reserved for brands with large production budgets. AI is making high-quality video creation faster, easier and significantly more accessible.

7. Video Still Has Its Limits

Consumers are conditioned to watch videos—not necessarily click on them. While AI-generated video is a huge opportunity for brand storytelling, Bob believes marketers should be realistic about its performance limitations.

8. Agent-to-Agent Commerce Will Take Time

The technology may exist, but trust doesn’t develop overnight. Bob compares AI agents negotiating purchases on our behalf to the early days of online shopping, when convincing people to enter their credit card details online felt almost impossible.

9. AI Still Needs Humans

Despite significant advances, hallucinations and quality control remain real challenges. Bob believes experienced marketers will continue playing an essential oversight role for the foreseeable future.

10. AI Could Disrupt Google’s Advertising Dominance

The next major advertising battleground may not be another search engine or social platform. Bob believes AI assistants are creating entirely new opportunities for advertisers as users grow increasingly fatigued by traditional digital advertising.

Bob’s Martech Hot Take

“The classic money that is living in the walled gardens today … is now about to be disrupted meaningfully by AI.”

For years, Google and Meta have dominated digital advertising by offering unmatched reach, targeting and measurement.

Bob believes that dominance is about to be challenged—not because AI advertising is inherently better, but because users are looking for a different experience.

As AI assistants become a more natural place to discover information and solve problems, advertising dollars will inevitably follow. The platforms that can introduce advertising without overwhelming the user experience will have a significant advantage over today’s increasingly crowded digital environments.

Bob’s Inspiration List

Bob believes the best marketers develop their thinking by looking well beyond marketing itself.

Here are a few of the voices currently shaping his perspective:

• Marketecture – One of Bob’s favorite sources for understanding the ever-changing ad tech and digital media landscape
• Open Market Podcast – A regular listen for insights into advertising, media and industry trends
• Scott Galloway – For his perspectives on business, economics and the cultural forces shaping modern marketing
• Michael Smerconish – For thoughtful, balanced commentary on societal trends and current affairs
• Lex Fridman – For long-form conversations exploring technology, economics, leadership and the future of AI

For Bob, understanding culture is just as important as understanding marketing.

Listen to the 10 Minute Martech Episode

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Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech ICYMI Series

Scott Snowden, Partner at Flywheel Strategic, joins us to explore why businesses are investing heavily in AI tools without making the same investment in their people, how practical AI applications are already freeing teams from repetitive work, and why marketers shouldn’t let AI erase the unique ideas and perspectives that make their brands valuable.

Want to Keep Reading?

Here’s the full transcript so you can explore every insight from Bob’s conversation with Sara.

Sara: I’m Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.

Bob: The dynamic creative, it’s starting to be discussed to be extrapolated to a place where you don’t actually need one unique creative per person, right? You don’t really need that much experimentation, and statistically it’s actually impossible, right?

Test all those permutations, and I think that will eventually die down in some practicality.

Sara: That’s Bob Regler, CEO of InfoLinks Media. Let’s get started.

Bob, you’ve been in the digital media space for a minute. Um, we’ve seen a lot of transformational periods over that time and a lot of changes. How do you think AI is impacting the change that we’re seeing today?

Bob: Well, our industry, the digital media advertising industry, loves fads, and so we chase fads all the time. Whether they’re, uh, meaningful or whether or not they’re just conceptual, they just make us excited.

And there has been a lot over the years, but I do think that AI is foundational. I think this is a true tectonic shift for digital media, frankly, for all media. You know, we had print and we had radio and we had television, very exciting mediums, but if you advertised on them, you had an intuitive sense on whether or not it was effective.

It wasn’t scientific. It wasn’t hyper data driven. And when the internet came in, and I, and I was a part of that phase, what was super exciting to advertisers and to the industry in general was measurement, the ability to know that you spent a dollar and you got a specific impression, a specific click, and you generated a specific conversion, and you had the democratization of performance.

Now AI is entering, and I think what’s going to happen with AI as a result of the capabilities, it will improve workflow, it will increase productivity, it will increase an improvement of analytics. It’s going to do all those things, but I think those things are really, frankly, um, table stakes. I think what it’s really going to do is it’s going to remove, um, our role as the decision-maker and the strategist of what it is that we buy, what was the result, and whether we’re happy with it or not.

Yeah. And that’s the most interesting thing is we’re going to say to the systems, “I wanna buy media to, to meet these audiences for my brand.” Right. “Buy what you think is the right thing- Right … to buy to deliver the best outcomes for me.” And I think that’s a suspension of everything that’s gone on in the history of buying media, where us as people, right, ultimately came up with the plan, the strategy, the, the execution, the workflow, the results, and we decided whether or not we felt good about that.

And I-- that suspension of reality, right, is, is just starting to unfold, and that’s where AI will transform it.

Sara: Yeah. I think the, uh, the control freak in me gets very uncomfortable with that concept. Sure. I don’t think you’re wrong, but I guess my question to you is, do you believe that there still needs to be a human in that, in that loop?

Even if AI is determining the strategy, it’s determining the-- you still have to have human, human inputs to get to that point. Where do you think the human belongs in that entire process?

Bob: Yeah. So, so I, I, I u- I like analogies. I think it helps people, right, understand things. Uh, I have a Tesla. Uh, my full self-driving feature on my Tesla when it first came out, I was very attentive.

I was incredibly careful. I was incredibly thoughtful, and I would take control very fast with minor problems. If you look at what my status is five years later, I’m almost not present. I’m paying attention, but it’s very loose attention. It’s very casual attention. I’m oversighting, I’m not engaged. And I think in the media buying phase, we’re hyper-engaged right now.

We’re almost like micro analysts, and we’ve let the MLs, the machine learned optimizers work, but we’re very attentive to, they have flaws. And I think as the AI starts to take over, it’ll remove more and more of the capabilities of us to oversight, and it’ll just start to do what it thinks is the right thing to do, and it’ll tell us that it’s the right thing that it should have done and, and it’ll, it’ll deliver.

And I think the advantage you have in media acquisition and marketing branding in the future will be whether or not the value of your brand and the yield value of your brand and what you’re trying to achieve is competitive enough so that the other folks using the same AI-

Sara: Right. Right,

Bob: Right.

Sara: Yeah …

Bob: have an advantage or disadvantage over you.

Sara: 100% agree with that. Yeah. Well, when you talked about some of the tectonic shifts, you also talked about the fact that there are fads right now in AI. Mm-hmm. Do you have some that you would call out as-- And they may be interesting, and they may be useful today, but they’re, that you think might be more of a fad than, than having the sticking power of some of these other things we’ve just talked about?

Bob: Yeah. I think some of the fads right now is the dynamic creative, uh, the ability to be able to build so many creatives on the fly.

Sara: Right.

Bob: Uh, I think dynamic creative is an excellent capability, and I do think there’s a relationship between who’s the audience and who’s the creative. Um, but I think that it’s being-- at least it’s starting to be discussed to be extrapolated to a place where you don’t actually need one unique creative per person, right?

You don’t really need that much experimentation, and statistically it’s actually impossible, right? To test all those permutations. And so, so there’s a lot of excitement around dynamic creative optimization and being able to create creatives on the fly and all kinds of different creatives on the fly, and I think that will eventually die down in some practicality.

And then, uh, I, I do think that we will see-- And this is not a fad, it’s a great thing, but we’ll see sort of this, you know, so it’s a cliché term, but democratization of video, which is a lot of folks could not afford to build video for a long time, and so you’d just build display ads, right? And you wouldn’t build video ads because it’s expensive production-wise.

I think today building a video ad is a piece of cake. AI can do it for you. A lot of tweaking, of course. Um, so I think there’s gonna be a lot more video, and so there’s gonna be a, a large chasing of video. The reason I think that may not work out as well is consumers have been programmed that videos are not clickable.

We don’t click on video, right? We watch video. And so, I think there’s a movement around let’s do a lot of video. And, and that’s great. It’s great for branding, it’s great for experience, it’s emotional. Um, but as a performance creative, it has limits. The other thing is I think that this workflow stuff, uh, I’ve seen huge advances in improving it, right, also.

Yep. Um, but I, I think it’s-- to my experience, it’s overblown. Right. I do think that, you know, you have a person that, that you can extrapolate their productivity. I don’t know if you can necessarily, uh, eliminate them from the- Right … at, at this stage, I haven’t seen the ability to just eliminate, right? Right.

Right. And then the bot will do it all perfectly. Yep. So far, I see a lot of hu- hallucinations still. Yes. Right? Even- Yeah … even Anthropic, Dario will say, “We-- it hallucinates. We’re not sure why.” I do also wanna add one last thing. I really do think agent-to-agent relationship is overblown, and it will take a lot longer.

I think there’s a huge trust element there and, and, and I’ll go back into history to use the analogy again, is we take it for granted today that you’ll buy things online, and you’ll use your credit card, and you don’t even think about it anymore, right? But you rewind the clock 20-- only 20 years and getting someone to use a credit card online was a Herculean task.

It had no trust, right? And re- and it was complicated. It was difficult. And so, companies like PayPal and other things were used to try and help, again, democratize and make it easy to buy online, you know? Agent-agent, I think it will take a lot of time for Sara’s agent to s- to buy from Bob’s agent, negotiate prices, say that it was the right thing, just execute without, uh, an approval, right?

And everybody will just be cool with that.

Sara: Yeah. Yeah. Well, a- and with that comes experimentation. So, I would love to understand, what are some experiments you’ve been trying or people on your team have been trying, um, recently that have, have been really successful, things that you are excited about, um, AI or not, um- Sure but just in the digital marketing space. Yeah.

Bob: So, we’ve been exper- we’ve been experimenting a lot with animation and been experimenting with ad behaviors that get the attention of folks like yourself, so that you’re, as you’re reading your article, it’s not interrupting you and taking you away, but you will actually notice the advertising, right?

And it’s funny. There are very simple things, like whether it be color or whether it be a slight animation. For example, if you had a banner that just simply shakes back and forth once, right? It moves your eye from the center to the location just for consideration. Simple things like that. Uh, we have a, you know, the typical ad, a 300 by 250 that, uh, you know, has been around for 100 trillion years.

We’ve been experimenting with making it 3D, where it rotates continuously, right, around and around in three-dimensional and gives the consumer a little slider that lets them rotate it So we’re experimenting with the placement, we’re experimenting with the animation, we’re experimenting with the colors, we’re experimenting with these things to try to break through.

And it’s been going really, really well, and we’ve been using AI to help us with some of those experiments.

Sara: Great. So, tell me this, who do you follow for inspiration or information?

Bob: So, I follow a lot of folks, and I follow across many different genres, and I find that, you know, to be the best because I think ad tech is, or digital media is a mixture of culture, a mixture of economics, and certainly a mixture of, uh, societal-oriented stuff.

So on, you know, on the ad tech digital media side, I really like Marketecture. I like Ari very much. I think he’s very sharp, understands the space really well, has sort of a, a wonky look on it. Open Market is also a great podcast that I like to follow, and it’s really great. You know, on, on cultural orientas- uh, um, oriented stuff; I like, uh, Scott Galloway’s many different things.

I find that he’s also very interesting. Uh, I like middle of the road folks like Smerconish. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but very middle of the road, right? Not too left, not too right, very thoughtful in, in many dimensions for cultural things. And, uh, Lex Fridman, I’ll throw in the last one, if you’ve got the tolerance to listen to three to four hours.

Not many people do, right? But it’s- Right … a mixture of economics and culture. So those are some of my, my, uh-

Sara: Awesome …

Bob: follows.

Sara: There you go. Love it. Uh, one last question for you. Uh, do you have a Martech hot take?

Bob: A lot of the classic money that is living in the walled gardens today, our Googles, our Facebooks, that has done a great job of vacuuming, a great job of vacuuming up the media dollars as a result of measurement, is a n- is now about to be disrupted meaningfully by open AI, by, by the AI companies allowing advertising to come into the ecosystem.

And, and the reason is not because AI is better. There’s fatigue.

Sara: Yeah.

Bob: There’s, there’s fatigue. And, and how do those platforms react to fatigue? They show more ads.

Sara: Yep. Yeah.

Bob: Now, right, you’ve got, you’ve got ads in, in ChatGPT and other things starting to evolve, and, and yes, they’re antiquated, but my hot take is you’re going to see a magnetism draw of money moving in search of that new- Yep

virgin user experience and response that those folks on the classic walled gardens are gonna struggle with.

Sara: Yep. Love it. I

Bob: love it.

Sara: Bob, it has been great talking today. Thank you so much for your time.

Bob: You’re welcome. I’ve loved it. Thank you. Appreciate it, Sara.

Sara: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Till next time, I’m Sara Fatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.

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