How Smart Ad Managers Are Already Using AI (Without Getting Replaced)

AI isn’t your enemy. But the strategist who knows how to use it better than you? That’s who you should be watching out for.

AI is everywhere right now. From fear-mongering headlines to overhyped promises of million-dollar prompts, it’s easy to feel like you’re already behind.

But here’s the truth:
AI won’t replace you—unless you ignore it.

In this episode of The Strategic Ad Manager’s Guide to AI and Staying in Demand, I’m breaking down exactly how smart freelancers and ad managers are already using AI as their secret weapon—without losing their value or becoming robots.

Let’s dive into how to use AI without losing your edge.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

1. The three “camps” of opinions on AI – fear of replacement, overhyped promises, and total rejection.
2. How ad managers can strategically use AI – especially in ways that enhance (not replace) their skills.
3. AI for ad management tasks – copywriting, audience research, ad variations/testing, reporting/analytics, and client SOPs/systems.
4. What AI should not be used for – strategic decisions (budget, funnel structure, messaging without context, creative direction without tone, sales calls, pitching value).
5. The importance of human insight – understanding clients’ real-life context, emotions, and unique business needs.
6. AI as a tool to increase efficiency and profitability – helping ad managers scale without hiring large teams, while still relying on their own expertise and soft skills.

Find the full show notes at:  https://brandimowles.com/264

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Transcript

How Smart Ad Managers Are Already Using AI (Without Replacing Themselves

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Brandi: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Strategic Ad Managers Guide to AI and Staying in Demand, a four part series for freelancers who are wondering, is AI coming for my clients?

Am I already behind? Or where does someone like me actually fit into this new world of robots? Over the next four episodes, I'm unpacking the good, the bad, the future of ai through the lens of ad managers, strategists, and freely lancers just like you, people building real businesses without wanting to become robots or get replaced by them.

I'm not here to fear monger or overhype tools. I'm here to get strategic, so let's dive on In

the truth. AI isn't coming for your job. Let's just get that out on the table and be clear. But the strategist, the ad manager, the person who knows how to use AI better than you just might. So the real opportunity for any ad manager or freelancer

it's to [00:01:00] embrace ai, use it as a tool, but it doesn't replace your brain. And most of what's being said about AI is from two extremes. And y'all know me, I'm never extreme about. Anything. I do have my hot button topics that I am very passionate about, but I don't think things are as white and black as people make them seem.

So the two extremes, it's gonna replace you run for your life, you can replace your whole marketing department with ai. Yes. Like we don't need people anymore. We have that extreme and then we have the other extreme that's

just plug in a prompt and it'll make you millions. That type where it's promising and overhyping what's possible. It's kind of like the online world, but like where we hear coaches say, make a million dollars in 15 days and stuff like that, but now it's just ai. And saying like, use this tool and you'll make millions.

And that's not really the truth either. And then I think there is [00:02:00] this third camp that we don't see as often, but they're definitely out there. And it's the people who are like, I'm not using ai. Like AI can never replace me like ai. It's gonna be just another fad. I can promise you. I don't think it's a fad.

I think it is here to stay. I do think we're at this like tipping point where AI's getting more and more advanced, and because of that it scares people. And so people are weary of. What is coming out. So I do think there's kind of like three camps. It's like it's gonna replace you. Oh my gosh. Fear mongering, that type of thing.

And then it's like you'll make millions just plug in these prompts and I don't. And then the third one is like, you want no part of ai. So wherever you're falling, if you are in one of those extremes, I don't think any of those extremes are as black, as white, as it may seem. I do think there's a gray area, and that's what I'm gonna go over over these next episodes.

And out of all those camps. They're not true for people doing real [00:03:00] work with real clients because as a strategist, as an ad manager, AI becomes powerful when you know your craft. So you already have to know the skill. It can't teach you the skill it can to a certain level, but it's kinda like YouTube where like you can get some of the information from YouTube, but at the end of the day, it's still not the complete picture.

It's only like a fraction of what you know how to search for, you know, your clients. So AI will never know your clients as well as you do. You're the one having real conversations with them. You know that like, oh gosh. Right now she has this big event with her kids and that's distracting her from this.

And also she's probably not focused on her business as much, and so that's probably why we have a dip in sales. You throw those metrics into AI and it's gonna tell you like, oh, here's the problem. But what we see in a data sheet, isn't always the whole story. We need to run things through numbers, but also as we know as service providers, our clients are real [00:04:00] people.

They're experiencing real life. Their life also affects their business. And so when we know about our clients, we're ahead. Of the game somewhere that AI can never be because we have that human element. We know outside situations that are going on that no matter how good you are at prompting, you're probably not telling chat GPT about these little things that do make a big difference when it comes to sales and you know how to direct the tools when.

A strategist or an ad manager is using AI correctly. It's not just throwing in generic prompts. It's really being almost a prompt engineer. You have to know how to get in there and what to do and what to ask, and what information to feed it, not just anyone off the street can do that.

So when we talk about this, what are the ways that we can leverage AI in our ad management business? One ad [00:05:00] copywriting, copywriting with ai. I will say this, AI will replace copywriters like point blank. And I know I may have a copywriter too, come out me, but you'll have people who don't want any part of AI and they still hire copywriters.

I don't think they're gonna pay. The prices that they used to pay. I think copywriters are gonna start to see a decline big time in how many clients they're getting and what they're being paid for. An example of this is I do a done with you SLO build, and part of that package is I write their sales page because I know that I'm probably gonna do it better than them and I can do a whole long form sales page for an SLO in two hours.

Using ai and the one that I just did is converting right now at an eight X roas, so an eight x return. And it was on for a physical therapist that I didn't even know the topic, like I had to do so much Googling on her actual topic and what she [00:06:00] teaches because it's very medically. And so when we look at that, the fact that I can write a high converting sales page.

Because of AI and do it in two hours, a sales page that would usually take a professional copywriter weeks and weeks to do. There's power in that and it comes because I know how to prompt, I know what questions to ask my client to get the right information in order to write an effective sales page. And so we can do the same thing with ads and content creation, like if we need a client to do.

A voiceover for an ad or a talking head. We can write the scripts, we can write the ad copy. We can use these resources to do that. So my favorite thing about AI is the copywriting. And if you're like, but Brandi, I get generic group responses, that's because you're not prompting it correctly. You can get the most amazing things that come outta chat GPT, when you know how to prompt correctly.

Then [00:07:00] also as ad managers, we can use it for audience research. So this one is really, really good because we can use it to find out what other people in the industry are offering. We can find out the competitor breakdown and build out detailed personas. We can find out what our clients people were into, and especially when.

So many people were like, detail targeting is dead. And I have a group of over a thousand ad managers and when I ask them what ads are performing the best, they say detail targeting. It shows me that like so many people are so jaded in how to run ads that they're just doing broad targeting and there is a time and place for broad.

But there's also the majority of time, time and place for detailed targeting and to do really well with detailed targeting. We need to do audience mining and audience mining used to be such a manual thing, and now we can use AI to really help us with the personas and the desires and the pain points of our clients.

Then we can [00:08:00] also create really good ad variations, testing hooks. So once you have like these personas and you're gonna have copy, we could generate like so many headlines to test. We can generate so many versions, a long version, a short version, a medium sized version. So variation in testing becomes so much easier to create this content machine for ads creative machine.

And as we're wrapping up, we're getting towards quarter four of 2025 going into 2026. Facebook's already came out and said meta. You need creative. Creative is gonna be the beast. And so when we know we need more creative, that means that we need to be able to pump that out and make that for clients. And I know for a lot of you, that's your biggest hangup.

Well, if you're using ai, it's not a big deal. You can pump out more creative, you can do more testing and not add a lot more time to your day. And so are we using it for ad variation and testing? [00:09:00] Then also I love it for reporting and analytics. We can throw in our reports, summarize weekly ad reports into client friendly language slide decks.

Freeing up so much time. If you haven't already, I want you to go to Brandy and company.com/streamline. We'll link it up in the show notes and on the podcast page, but brandy and company.com/streamline. And I want you to grab my Streamline AI guide because when you grab that, I'm going to give you prompts to use for so many things.

But one of my favorite is how to summarize reports. And we had someone in Strategist Society use the prompt before I even released this guide, use the prompt. And then from there, she was able to cut off four hours a week of her reporting time. And she was able to outsource the reporting to someone else, and then she does a quick glance over like, oh my gosh, y'all, I know two of your [00:10:00] biggest hangups when it comes to ad management is creative and reports AI is here to help you.

It is gonna help you, but then also it can help you with your client SOPs. You're onboarding, you're offboarding, your workflows, your FAQs, automations. Oh my gosh. When it comes to systems, AI is like your best friend. It will become the team member that you thought you needed to hire. And that's beautiful.

Y'all know I'm big on not growing an agency, not having a soul sucking team to have to manage. You are moms, you are women. You already have a mental load. Why are we trying to grow these massive agencies with more and more people to manage when you already got little ones at home or maybe big ones at home, or heck, if you have a husband, it's like having another child.

Am I right? And so when we think about that, how can we use AI to be our team member, increase our profits so we don't need to hire someone and decrease headaches. [00:11:00] So the, some of the smart ways ad managers can use AI and there's so many more, but those are my favorite ways. So we talked about how you can use AI for, but now we really need to address.

What shouldn't you be using AI for? And this is where you become irreplaceable because AI can't do what you can do. Strategic decisions, budget offer, funnel structure. Yes, it can give us some ideas and we can use it as like a starting point, but at the end of the day, like it is not gonna make the best budget decisions or.

Offer decisions or funnel structure because when it comes to like what type of funnel you should offer, what type of budget, what all that stuff, there's such a human element to that. I do think that it can help with budgeting if you need, like, Hey, here's my budget, what would you do? But what I find also is it splits the budget too thin, and then the ads don't work.

So when it comes to budget offer, funnel structure, AI [00:12:00] is not gonna be able to replace you. If you wanna be a strategist, these are the skills you have to master because AI isn't gonna get these, right, the messaging without context. If you're just trying to get like copy for a client's ads, but you haven't put in the right, it's not even prompt.

You have to feed it information. So in Strategist Society, we have a whole detailed questionnaire. It's called a messaging questionnaire, and it's, we go over it with our clients, or we have our clients fill it out on their own. And then we use that messaging. Questionnaire to feed into chat GPT, so then they already know the ideal client and situation.

If I were to just go in and try to write a whole sales page without that, or giving examples of my client's works, emails, they've written, things like that, it wouldn't put out the right information. It would get very generic and it would look like what everyone else is putting out there that because they're not using ai.

At its full potential, they're using it as a very [00:13:00] surface level. So we don't wanna do messaging without context. We also don't want it to do creative direction without brand tone. So all your clients will probably have a way that they present themselves and show up online. So let's say you're doing a travel influencer that's in her twenties and she takes a ton of like.

Beautiful background shots. Living her best life, no kids, that's who she's targeting. Bikini photos and these like beautiful mountains, lakes, all this stuff. Okay? So how she shows up from a creative direction is gonna be very different than the homeschooling mom who is selling a homeschooling course to women who have 3, 4, 5 kids in sourdough making and running a household.

That creative direction is gonna look very, very different. So if we're trying to get creative direction. Without brand tone or brand visuals or anything like that, it's not gonna hit the mark. It's [00:14:00] not gonna talk to the right person. It's the same thing with messaging. Our creative and messaging go hand in hand, and we have to make sure that we're leaning into what our clients want to visually show up as, as much as what they want to have their words on the post.

Also, we're not gonna use it for sales calls or pitching your value. Oh my gosh. There was someone who told me that they were doing their setter calls. So like the first, some people who run ads and stuff, they'll have a call setter who sets the call, and then they maybe take the first 15 minutes call just to make sure they're qualified before they get on a discovery call, and they literally outsource that to ai.

And I was like, no, that is so weird. That is so weird. And then also trying to use AI to pitch your value. You need to know your value. You need to know what you stand for. You need to have your core values. Yes, we can help have chat two BT help us like. Structure a proposal or something like that. But at the end [00:15:00] of the day, you have to know your value.

That can't just come from a computer or a robot. You need to know what is your value, how do you wanna show up? What are your core values? And that has to come from within you, not from a robot bypassing the work of becoming a better marketer. And so if you don't know how to do it without ai. You won't know how to do it with ai, like point blank.

And so if you're like sleeping on your laurels, I think that's the saying because you think AI is just gonna do everything. That's not true. I spend so much time digging into my craft of offer, creation of messaging, a buyer psychology of advertising, like. I spend so much time diving into those and get better at my craft.

'cause the better I get at my craft, the more I can use AI to get the information and the prompts that I need. So an example of this is like, what we shouldn't do [00:16:00] with that is I had someone and they were really stuck on. This client's work and she was trying to figure out something and she uploaded all these surveys and chat just wasn't giving her like the right pattern.

She was like, no, I already knew that. I said, send me over the surveys. I looked over the surveys and within 15 minutes was able to spot what was going on. The same thing happened with, um, one of our strategists. Society members, Facebook had changed its ui. There was a few new settings. She said it was late at night, so she was trying to figure it out, get a new campaign up, could not figure it out, spent 30 minutes.

Finally, she boxed me. I got it the next morning and I got in there and within two minutes was able to troubleshoot with her, even though chat was saying like, no, like sorry, this isn't available. You can't change that setting. It doesn't know everything, especially in a world moving as fast as meta and the changes that happen in [00:17:00] meta.

And so that's when we have to start like using our brain and not relying on AI for everything. AI is a tool. It's not gonna replace you if you continue to show up and get better at your craft, your skill, and you know how to use AI as an advantage, but not necessarily as your brain.

So your strategist advantage is as like a calculator. It's powerful, but only if you already understand the math. So like my daughter could go punch in a bunch of numbers into a calculator. We're on subtraction and adding, like we haven't got to multiplication division. And so if I told her eight times eight, like she should. She could go, but she's not gonna know necessarily how to punch that in. She's not gonna know what that means. She's just gonna be able to go through the motions. Right. She knows what a multiplication sign is, but she wouldn't know like.

Eight times [00:18:00] eight means this. And so when you're just punching in things without knowing the why behind, then you're just gonna be like everyone else out there that is just putting out garbage right now. And so if you learn how to punch in the numbers, but you know the meaning behind the numbers as well.

Oh man, you're gonna be unstoppable. And what's so beautiful is you're gonna have more profit in your pocket. 'cause you're not gonna need to grow a team. You're gonna be able to handle. More clients. So AI is this wonderful thing, but it also has its disadvantages, especially if we're trying to get it to do something that it's not meant to do.

It's not meant to replace you. And so your values as a strategist is knowing what to ask for, knowing what to tweak, knowing what not to trust. That comes out of ai. Everything that comes out isn't true. And so those are your perks. But also your biggest perk is you are a human. You have human [00:19:00] emotions, a human touch, and more and more and more, is that gonna become valuable when you can lean into your human aspects, the soft skills, you will not be replaced by ai.

When you can learn to use AI plus get better at your skill and lean into the soft skills like communication, you will be able to charge more, work less, and have clients raving. About you. So I'm so excited to kick off this series. We still have three more episodes, y'all, and they're coming, and so. If you haven't already, what I want you to do is go to brandy and company.com/streamline and download your AI guide.

And then I want you to DM me at Brandi Mowles and tell me what was your biggest takeaway. I have a surprise for anyone who dms me, so make sure you DM me at Brandi Mowles and tell me what was your biggest takeaway. Okay, y'all, until the next episode, go out, serve your clients, [00:20:00] scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.