Marketers Are Losing Control of Targeting, Content and Data — Here's How to Fight Back

No marketing cliché is more beloved than reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time. But while achieving goal that has never been easy, marketers could at least choose how they tried. Today, those decisions are increasingly out of their hands.

Consider the basic task of picking your audience. Back in the day, marketers analyzed the readers of a newspaper, viewers of a TV show, or visitors to a website. They chose the outlets that delivered what they considered their target audience and decided how often to send their messages. Even programmatic advertising allowed them to specify an audience profile to target and set frequency caps, although they might not control exactly where their ads ran.

Most online advertising is controlled by search, social and commerce media vendors who largely use their own algorithms to pick who sees which ads. Other important channels like online marketplaces (e.g. Amazon) and AI search summaries (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini) give marketers even less control over who sees which products.

An optimist might argue that letting publishers pick advertising audiences is in the marketer’s interest, since the publisher is motivated to pick the best targets for each message. But while that may be true for ads that sell to a company’s best prospects, it doesn’t apply when a company is trying to reach a new audience or introduce a new product. When marketers controlled their media buys, they could decide to invest in relatively unproductive media for strategic purposes. When publishers pick the audiences, this is much harder.

How AI-Generated Creative and Reduced Reporting Are Squeezing Marketers

More recently, marketers have begun to lose control over their content as well. Programs like Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max and TikTok Smart+ not only pick who sees which ads and where they run, but generate custom creative to fit the channels they select. At least those programs start with content provided by the marketer: AI search summaries and marketplace listings offer marketers even less control over how their products are presented.

If you became a marketer to indulge your inner control freak, this might be a good time to reconsider your career choice. But it gets worse. At the same time that big web publishers are taking over audience selection, message frequency and content creation, they’re also reducing the information they share about who sees your ads and are increasingly asking you to accept their reports on how your ads are performing. And they’re increasingly applying their “do it for you” services to online video, connected TV, podcasts, outdoor and other channels included in ever-expanding ad networks.

Are you curled up into a ball yet?

In case it’s not already clear, the problem here extends beyond loss of control. Marketers are losing access to information about their customers and prospects. This prevents them from delivering optimal personalized experiences to each individual and from learning how to improve their marketing in the future.

Related Article: What Did 1 Billion Google AI Mode Users Search for Over Past Year?

Marketing Control Losses and Strategic Responses

The following table highlights the most important lessons, actions and strategic considerations emerging from marketers' declining control over targeting, content and measurement.

Key Area	What Happened	Why It Matters	Recommended Action
Audience targeting	Search, social and commerce platforms now use their own algorithms to select who sees ads	Marketers lose the ability to invest strategically in unproductive-seeming media to reach new audiences	Buy ads on platforms that still allow manual targeting; test alternatives like retail media and interactive TV
Content creation	Advantage+, Performance Max and Smart+ auto-generate ad creative alongside targeting	Marketers lose control over how their brand and product are presented, even when they supply the source content	Build non-paid presence in AI search and agent-consumable content; develop interactive ad units to control the follow-on conversation
Performance reporting	Platforms share less granular data and push marketers toward accepting their own performance reports	Marketers can't fully verify or optimize campaigns without independent visibility	Build channel-independent measurement anchored in retail sales data
Customer access	Marketing is a shrinking share of how brands reach customers directly	Reduced non-platform contact points limit relationship-building outside paid media	Invest in direct-to-buyer channels (events, newsletters, podcasts) and non-marketing touchpoints (packaging, customer service, product interfaces)

Seven Ways Marketers Can Regain Control From Platform Gatekeepers

Fortunately, marketers are not completely at the mercy of the new media overlords. Steps you can take to regain some control include:

• Buy ads where you have control. Not all publishers have reached advanced development of Meta and Google. Other ad platforms still let you pick your own target audience and provide your own content. Even Advantage+ and Performance Max are still optional, at least for now. And, of course, offline media like print and linear TV still work the way they always did.
• Experiment with new paid media. Paid chatbot advertising is here already; retail media is well established and still growing. Interactive TV ads and social commerce are not quite mainstream but well past the initial experiments. Test these as appropriate. They won’t necessarily give advertisers more control than other media but at least they provide some alternatives to increasingly opaque walled gardens.
• Build non-paid market presence. Every marketer on the planet is already trying to figure out how to appear in AI search and chatbot results, so it’s a good bet that you’re already doing this. Be systematic and keep an eye out for emerging best practices in areas such as developing agent-consumable content.
• Develop direct-to-buyer channels. Consider events, newsletters, videos, corporate podcasts and similar methods of reaching customers and prospects directly. The goal here is to build an audience and relationships, not make immediate sales. So be entertaining and informative, not crudely commercial.
• Exploit non-marketing contact points. Don’t overlook existing contact points such as packaging, delivery and customer service, or new contact points such as web-connected product interfaces. The navigation chatbot on your website and the dashboard on your product app can be brilliant salespeople if you train them correctly.
• Develop interactive ad units. Even if you can’t control the message that is initially presented to your audience, an interactive unit lets you control the subsequent conversation. There’s a strong case that interactive advertising is the wave of the future but we’ll leave that for another day.
• Build channel-independent measurement capabilities. Retail sale data can be key to this. This will let you assess the impact of new (and old) marketing approaches even if those approaches don’t provide the information you need to measure them directly.

New World, and Marketers Need to Get Creative ... Again

In sum, online gate-keepers like Meta, Google and Amazon have taken an unprecedented amount of control from today’s marketers and have made access to your customers more difficult than ever. It’s important to recognize these facts and to take active steps to ensure that you can still reach the customers you choose with the messages you create at the times you prefer. It’s either that, or find a new favorite cliché.

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