The Dark Side of AI in Digital Marketing: What No One’s Warning You About

AI isn’t just your assistant anymore; it’s becoming a voice in the room. But what happens when that voice is confidently wrong?

In this second episode of The Strategic Ad Manager’s Guide to AI and Staying in Demand, Brandi Mowles breaks down the hidden dangers of AI tools for freelancers, ad strategists, and digital marketers. From confidently incorrect ChatGPT advice to Meta’s AI-generated ad hype, we’re peeling back the curtain and exposing where real strategists still shine.

If your clients are trusting AI more than you… it’s not a robot problem, it’s a positioning problem.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

1. AI can sound smart but still be wrong. Don’t let it wreck client trust.
2. Meta’s AI ad tools aren’t replacing you—they’re helping DIYers boost posts.
3. Strategists win by guiding clients, not just running campaigns.
4. Communication and positioning will matter more than ever.
5. You don’t have a robot problem—you have a leadership opportunity.

Find the full show notes at:  https://brandimowles.com/265

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Additional Resources:

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Transcript

265: The Dark Side of AI in Digital Marketing: What No One’s Warning You About

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Brandi: [00:00:00] Today's episode is the dark side of AI in digital marketing. What No One's Warning you about, so welcome back, my friend, this is the Strategic Ad Managers Guide to AI and staying in Demand podcast series. This is episode two of four, and my name is Brandi Mowles. I'm super excited you're here and I'm breaking down like what is the deal with ai?

I don't think it's black and white. I think it's a very gray area, and that's why we have this four part series going on. In the last episode, I showed you how smart ad managers are using AI today without replacing their own value. Because this series does layer onto each other, you're not gonna wanna miss that one.

So go back and check that one out if you have it. But today we're looking at the dark side. What happens when AI gets misused, misinterpreted, or mislead your client? AI is fast. It's been moving at warp speed for the last two [00:01:00] years, and it's becoming more of a household name than any other technology really that we've seen in the last decade.

Almost AI's powerful and it is coming for jobs, but it doesn't have to come for yours, and I know it cannot replace you if you apply what we're teaching in this series, but ai, even as smart as it is, it can be wrong and it's actually wrong a lot.

And if you don't know how to check it, it can really be detrimental for your clients, your relationships with them, and your credibility. So I wanna tell you first about a little story and this is the first dark side of AI when AI sounds confident, but it's completely wrong.

So one of my strategist society members asked chat, GBTA simple question, can you still target a certain demographic in Meta Adss Che GPT told her bold, very confident answer. [00:02:00] Yes you can. It's available. You can do that. And guess what y'all, it was dead freaking wrong. She went into her client meeting without checking and she brought it to that client and she told them, yes, we're able to target that demographic.

We're able to tap into that audience. And yeah, that was true back in 2021. You were able to tap into that audience. But the thing is. Meta is moving just as fast as AI and things are always changing in there. It's my full-time job just to keep our students up to date with what's going on, and she brought that to her client and then she had to go like a puppy with her tail tuck between her legs and tell the client that she was wrong.

And that hurts. Talk about confidence going from a level 10 to a level two, and she's not the only one who's done this. We've had so many cases where a client's like, oh, I asked [00:03:00] chat GBT and it said this students inside conversions for clients. And I'm like, that's flat dead wrong. Like that is just not true.

So what we need to do is make sure we're always double checking what AI is saying. It can give us ideas, it can brainstorm, it can help us look at reports, but we should never take it as the end all be all answer. It should be like your best friend in college that feel like you always felt like they knew that answer to everything.

But they said it so confidently and then you went and you were like, wait, that doesn't sound right. And you looked it up and it was wrong, but they said it with confidence. That's exactly how AI is. It comes out because it's a robot and it sounds confident, but it is our job to always go and double check.

It's a starting point, not an endpoint. That's the difference between using chat GBT for your business and being a trained strategist. You use it as a tool, but you [00:04:00] also always use your brain to help you.

The tool doesn't have discernment. It has data, and the data is not always accurate. It's pulling from the internet, so maybe it's pulling from a YouTube video from 2021. There are so many ways to get wrong information when plugging stuff in, especially when it comes to meta, because it's. So fast moving and meta is even bat at updating their own help support.

You may not. They may roll out something and you don't even see it come up for another three months in their help support. So relying on chat GPT to make those decisions is only gonna lead you down all rabbit hole of being wronged a whole lot of times. And when we're wrong, our clients start to lose trust in us, and

it is way easier to lose trust than it is to build it back. So we wanna try to keep that trust with our clients as much as possible, which is why we should not lean on chat GPT as [00:05:00] the end of the game. It is a tool that we can tap into, but you are the expert.

You are the one that knows the right answer, and you may have to do a little bit more Googling to find it or ask in a group like conversions for clients. But just taking chat JPTs word on it is not the right play for your business. Okay, so now that we know that Chat, GPT can be wrong and it is wrong, especially with something moving as fast as meta.

Then the second dark side is Meta's version of AI generated ads. And why you shouldn't panic. So some of you have come to me and you slid into my dms and you were like, what are your thoughts on this article? And it's where Zuckerberg gets up and he's like talking to his investors and everything and he's like, we are gonna make AI with ads, and you are gonna be able to just click a few buttons in your ad copy.

You're creative. You're targeting, it's all gonna be done for you, and people start [00:06:00] freaking out. They're like, what does this mean about my job? What does this mean about ad managers? Okay, y'all, if you've seen some of their AI tools that rolled out, and then you have clients that are messaging you saying like, why does it say this?

Why does it look like this? Their AI stuff is just as wonky as any AI stuff. Sometimes you get good. Sometimes you don't. So who is that for? That is for those who are business owners, maybe spending five, $10 a day doing it solo. They want more people advertising 'cause that's how they make more money. So in order to get more people to advertise, they need to make it easy as possible.

But here's the deal, most business owners don't even know how to log into Ad Manager, let alone click a few buttons to set up a campaign. So the people who are gonna. Use that AI generated ads are not the people who are gonna pay you 2, 3, 4, $5,000 a month. Those are the people who need something that's just easy to throw up, just to put some [00:07:00] money behind, to keep people from boosting, but instead actually putting a structured ad out there.

I think that it's just a bunch of hype. Zuckerberg's gotta get people excited. He has a job, he has to make the board and the trustees and all those people happy. So why not put out this big vision for what's coming? This isn't the first time Zuckerberg's promised things, and then we're five years down the road and nothing has come of it.

So I do, a part of me thinks that it is a lot of hype. Another part of me knows that he is pouring tons of money into ai. And so yes, we probably at some point in the distant future, may see where that becomes a possibility. But do I think it's gonna be as good as ads that you put out that work for your business?

They're looking at e-commerce businesses and big, big, big, like Coca-Cola, Disney, those type of people. So when we think about who they're gonna create these for, it's gonna be for those big companies like Disney, target, things like that. Or it's gonna be [00:08:00] for e-commerce, which doesn't always translate very well into if you're working with local businesses or online businesses.

That's why some of the AI tools now just don't make sense for most of our clients, because we work at such a niche level. Or because our creative is so important, it's not just a picture of a perfume bottle. We're like putting people in there or we're doing reels. And so when it comes to this whole AI and Zuckerberg's vision for it, I don't think we need to worry as much as people like want to worry about it.

And it's not gonna be for those premium clients with funnels, launches Evergreen local, I think it is gonna be more geared towards either the $5 a day people. Or they're gonna take the data they, that they have from the big companies like Coca-Cola who spend like 9 million a year just on brand awareness ads, something like that, or e-commerce.

But there will still be business owners who need you because the AI's not gonna work for them. Just like the [00:09:00] meta AI right now doesn't work for them. And that's why we turn off most of 'em. So meta AI isn't here to replace you. It's gonna help some small business owners stop PO boosting posts and start having a structured ad account, or it's really gonna help those big, big businesses scale their campaigns that they're already spending millions of dollars on.

What I want you to leave this section with is reminding yourself and your clients that automation isn't the same as optimization. They're different. So maybe they can throw up an ad. Does that mean it's gonna work?

No. Once the A's up, then what happens? Copy isn't strategy, and a lot of times the copy that meta puts out isn't even good copy because here's the thing. They're pulling from all E-commerce. E-commerce is so good at creative, like if you're a e-commerce ad manager, you probably nail creative. One thing that online businesses nail is direct response marketing, which means our messaging and our copy is really good.

So if you can merge those two, you [00:10:00] become the strategist, not just copy. And then ad setup isn't client ROI Just because maybe they'll be able to like. Click a few buttons and set up an ad, doesn't mean that they're gonna see a return on that ad spin. So it's not something to worry about, and it is a reason to position yourself as more of a strategist instead of just a doer.

That is the difference that will come in the next several years as you need to know strategy, not just how to click a bunch of buttons.

And that's exactly why we created Strategist Society. 'cause we know that in conversions for clients, you learn how to click all the buttons, you know how to set up the campaigns. But in Strategist Society, we teach you how to think like a strategist, the whole picture, the traffic, the funnels, the follow up, the email campaigns, the messaging.

And so when you can step into that era, you're gonna be more desirable, even if something like this does roll out eventually. Okay, so the third part. Of the dark side of AI is clients using [00:11:00] AI to undermine your strategies. Another strategist society member came to me and she had a client who put her entire strategy into chat, GPT, all her ads, all her copy, and came back and was like, Hey, because of chat GPT, we need to do X, Y, and Z.

And it's saying this and it's saying that, and it's saying this. And I was like, oh my gosh. I would fire the client instantly, but she's not gonna do that. She did need to have a come to Jesus conversation with them. Clients think they're being smart. I don't think they do it to undermine you. I think they want the best results for their business.

And especially when you're working with people who are high achievers, visionaries, they wanna know that the best strategy is working. And right now people think that you can just dump stuff into chat GPT, and it's gonna give you the best answer. That's what we talked about. The first thing about the dark side of ai, it's not always right, and a lot of times it's wrong.

Clients think they're being smart, but they're being misled. And it is [00:12:00] our job to put them back on the right path. AI doesn't know launch calendars, budgets, pass result, business goals. The market like it does, but it doesn't see it as a whole picture like we can, and it doesn't know that client's specific needs.

And so whenever a client comes to us, we have to be able to have a hard conversation. With them about why this may or may not be the best option for them. Communication is gonna be such a powerful skill. It's always been a powerful skill and it's one that I've harped on for the last six years about how important it is to really dial in your communication.

It's one of the things in the strategist society I do the most with our members. Is we work on communicating with our clients in an effective way. It's a soft skill so people don't pay attention to it, but it's a skill that will serve you more and more and more, especially as we move into the world of ai.

And it's a skill that's [00:13:00] always coming up against criticism when new generations, because our genzer don't know how to communicate. And a large portion of millennials struggle with communication. So it is a skill you wanna hone into and one that chat gpt is not gonna help you with. So what can you do when this happens?

One, you're gonna stay calm. We're gonna take the emotions out of it. It sucks when any client takes our. Strategy and goes to someone else and wants to critique. It really sucks when they do it to a robot. Two, we don't get defensive. We stick to the facts and we get strategic three. We're gonna say, this is an interesting prompt.

Here's what AI is missing though. Being able to explain the why behind the strategy is how you protect your authority and how you get your clients to stop posting stuff in chat. GPT. So those are the three main dark sides of ai. It gets it wrong and we're not checking it [00:14:00] because it sounds confident. Two Meta's vision of AI generated ads isn't something you should panic about, but it isn a more reason to step into your strategist there. And when clients start using AI to undermine your strategy and how to deal with that.

So this matters now more than ever. AI isn't just a tool, it's become a voice in the room. And that may be scary, like that is kind of scary. If your clients listening to AI more than they're listening to you, you've got a positioning problem, you have a communication problem, you don't have a robot problem.

You have a communication and a positioning problem. You can't just be an executor anymore, a button pusher. You have to be the strategist. You have to be the guide. You have to be the leader in the room if you wanna stay in the room and continue to get paid I hope this shows you how your job. Your career is not in trouble. [00:15:00] If you continue just to be the task doer, it may become in trouble, it may be replaced, but when you come and you can communicate and you bring the strategy and you show the whole picture, your job is not going anywhere. And at the end of the day, I don't even think if you're a button pusher or a tasker or your job's going anywhere because there are so many people who.

Can't even freaking log into their ad account and do ads. So you'll always have those people who don't even wanna fuss with it, even if it's just two clicks to make an ad. So you will continue to be paid well. But if you wanna stay on with clients long term, have really impactful relationships and get paid bank, then you want to step into the strategist era and use AI as a tool.

And so that's where we're gonna talk about in next. Episode, the Future of Ad Management in an AI powered world. I don't wanna leave you here with nothing. I wanna give you a guide. So I [00:16:00] created this guide, the streamlined ad manager to show you how you can use. AI and chat DPT as your virtual assistant, your executive assistant, so that way you can scale to 20, 30 k months and you don't need to hire a team.

This is gonna save you countless hours with reporting. It's also gonna help you with client communication. It's gonna cut down on your ad copy, time and creative, and more chores completely free. Just go to brandy and company.com/streamlined. We'll also link this up in the show notes. So you can grab that freebie and then I'll see you in the next episode.

Until next week, go out, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve. Okay.