It’s 2018 and it is easy to imagine a Black Mirror, dystopian world dominated by robots. There’s already an app for everything: self-check out machines at the supermarket, journalist robots publishing sports articles and self-deposit machines at the banks. You can check in your own bags at the airports and there are Amazon courier drones delivering right to your door. In our life time, Uber may progress to driverless taxis, reduce their price further and monopolise the market entirely. At the New York Google Partners Summit, we were greeted by Julie, the interactive receptionist robot that answered attendee’s questions. This conversational interface is also being trialled in clothing shops to tell customers whether something they want is in stock or not. Will we become a useless class of people, the generation whose careers have become obsolete? No, absolutely not. The more favourable narrative, and the one we believe in, is that marketers will become ‘Imagination Workers’ - as Rob Norman (see diagram below), former CEO and Chief Digital Officer of GroupM first coined. This means we will have our time back, to exercise our imagination and flex our creative muscles. We will be freed from the responsibility of the day to day manual updating of colossal campaigns that have thousands of Ad Groups and infinite keywords. This means we have time to expand our influence and enter new markets for the advertiser.  However, we will not want to give over control entirely, campaign professionals will still need to oversee and monitor the automation. Humans and robots working together to improve efficiency. Google says 'rather than manually adding thousands of keywords or individually testing headlines to see which ones work best, you can train Google’s machine learning platform to do it for you’.  Working smarter, not harder, and ‘unlocking our most precious resource which is time.’ Data driven models and algorithms that learn user signals will grant insight and deliver value to campaigns like never before. These ‘patterns are used to predict future auctions, where and how to bid, and what ads to show and to whom.’ In addition, the targeting capabilities and potential for real time optimisation will benefit the advertiser’s return on advertising spend (ROAS) as it will improve performance at scale and accelerate growth. It will help brands meet rising consumer expectations towards further assistance, and give them a highly relevant and curated, immersive advertising experience. Machine learning and automation in the Digital space will allow for more time for us to spend creating innovative assets and trialling new, omni-channel strategies. Behavioural science teamed with machine learning will create a far richer and profitable landscape that will prevent wastage of media budget. Finally, human to human interaction can never be replaced. The biggest and most successful brands appeal to a certain emotion that their customer identifies with and the brand is lodged permanently into their customer’s lives through this association. This emotional intelligence needs real brain power and human experience. To conclude, this is great news for us as the UK’s fastest growing Performance Marketing Agency. We are already benefitting from dynamic search ads and smart bidding to run the most cost-effective campaigns for our clients, helping us achieve 'Top Performing Agency' as ranked by Google in the whole of the UK and Ireland. For more information on dynamic search ads and smart bidding, please contact KMG today.