If you’re running paid media programs, your to-do list is probably a mile long (and growing). Between strategy, reporting, QA, budget management, creative, competition, and incoming requests, you don’t need anymore AI theory about how it “could” help. You need real ways you can plug it in now.
At Seer, our Paid Media division has totally been right there. That’s why we started experimenting with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and custom GPTs to maximize our work and grow impact.
It’s important to remember, none of these use cases replace human expertise, they’re up-leveling it.
AI helps us move faster, spot patterns, and automate the automateable, but it still needs your skill to apply context, catch errors, and make sure it’s marketing for humans.
When paired with experience, it’s your competitive advantage.
Here are 5 real challenges we faced, and how we actually used AI to tackle them.
How We’re Using AI to Solve 5 Real Paid Media Challenges
1. From Messy Inputs → Clear Media Plans
Challenge: Unstructured updates, cross-functional inputs, and meeting recaps makes it tough to quickly prioritize activities and generate a plan to execute efficiently.
How to Apply AI: Extract goals, tasks, and priorities from long-form text—turning scattered input into a clear, prioritized action plan.
Strategic Value: Speeds up the shift from planning to execution saving time, reducing manual effort, and ensuring the changes you’re making are the most impactful.
“Using ChatGPT to streamline task management has completely changed how I tackle unstructured client requests. Instead of manually breaking down long, complex paragraphs into actionable steps, I leveraged AI to quickly extract priorities, define tasks, and outline the most efficient execution plan. This not only saved time but also ensured clarity, helping me move faster while staying aligned with client needs. AI doesn’t replace strategic thinking, but it’s an invaluable tool for transforming ambiguity into clear, structured action—allowing me to work smarter and deliver stronger results.”
- Marisa Rosso
2. From Manual Ad Reviews → Insightful Paid Social Competitive Intelligence
Challenge: Spending time manually analyzing competitor ad screenshots, which is tedious and inconsistent.
How to Apply AI: Upload ad screenshots and prompt ChatGPT to identify trends, analyze tone, and surface key differentiators across ads, enhancing our observations.
Strategic Value: Frees up time to focus on testing and improvements, while keeping an eye on compete and maintaining a differentiated strategy.
"Using ChatGPT for competitor insights has been a game-changer in how I approach competitor ad analysis. Instead of spending extra time manually reviewing and drafting callouts for a monthly report, I uploaded a slide of 6 competitor ad screenshots to ChatGPT. It quickly analyzed the designs, messaging, typography, colors, and overall tonality—highlighting subtle details I might have overlooked.
Beyond just saving time, ChatGPT provided insights in a structured, client-friendly format, allowing me to refine my recommendations while keeping them soft and observational in line with the client's needs. I was especially impressed with how it could assess individual ads while also identifying broader patterns across competitors."
- Amanda Miller
3. From Reporting Bottlenecks → Automated Dashboards That Run Themselves
Challenge: For example, if you’re using a tool like looker and have a writeup you want to include in a weekly report (like we do!). A person has to go add and copy over notes into those platforms.
How to Apply AI: Write or refine scripts that automate data population, recurring annotations, or formatting steps in Looker.
Strategic Value: Reduces time spent on low-impact work + improves reporting quality and delivery.
“AI helped me not only think outside the box of my previous experience, but it helped me actually get those ideas in motion and troubleshoot along the way. It was nice to have a “coach” leading me through the process, rather than a Reddit board to sift through.”
- Josh Meyers
4. From Compete Guesswork → Simple Landing Page Benchmarking
Challenge: You want to stay on top of competitor trends while creating and improving quality landing page experiences.
How to Apply AI: Compare your pages with competitors', identify content gaps, UX issues, and messaging inconsistencies that may be hurting quality scores or conversions.
Strategic Value: Combined with a paid media team’s expertise, AI can surface actionable CRO opportunities and gives Paid Media Managers an informed, actionable way to bring improvements forward.
💡 Pro-tip: AI still hallucinates, so use this as a mechanism to scale your analysis – not replace it!
“ChatGPT was able to evaluate competitor landing pages and provide us very specific examples of key differences between the pages. We were able to scale our analysis in a much more efficient way. I saved hours of research and screenshots and developed a way to scale this analysis across our account. The results spurred countless additional tests and insights!”
- Brittany Sager
5. From Scattered Keyword Lists → Automatic Optimization Audits
Challenge: Sifting through dozens of lists, associated with several different campaigns to perform an audit is tedious.
How to Apply AI: Write scripts that pull the data you want into one easy-to-review file. Clean data = happy marketers.
Strategic Value: Increases control over wasted spend, unlocks better optimizations, and lets you focus on what actually moves performance. Less time slogging through data, more time taking action!
“We needed to audit our negative keyword lists, but with so many lists, I was worried this task would take me forever. Using ChatGPT to create a script, I was able to pull negative keyword lists and their associated campaigns into one easy view and complete the audit much faster. After completing this project, I have lots of great ideas for other ways I might be able to use ChatGPT-created scripts to pull data from the platforms in ways that aren’t available otherwise.”
- Margaret Hoffman
You're Closer Than You Think
AI won’t replace your expertise, but it can give you leverage. Time back, clarity, and the ability to focus on the work that moves the needle is a game changer.
These five plays helped us cut through the blockers and busywork.
Curious how you can get ahead with AI in your Paid Media efforts? Let’s talk.
