For most of the last decade, the skill in paid media was targeting. Build the perfect audience. Layer the interests. Exclude the right people. Split test the segments. The advertiser who knew exactly who to reach usually won.

That skill is being automated away, and it’s happening faster than most automotive marketers have adjusted for.

Targeting has become a suggestion

On Meta, the direction is clear. Detailed targeting exclusions were removed on 21 January 2025, with Meta citing 22% better performance without them. From 15 January 2026, several targeting interests were retired or combined, and Meta may now deliver ads beyond the interests you select if its system predicts better results. Even Ads Manager describes those choices as “Your suggestion.” Since February 2026, Meta has merged Manual and Advantage+ Shopping into one unified campaign flow.

Google is moving the same way. As of April 2026, AI Max for Search is out of beta and available to all advertisers globally. It finds search queries beyond your keywords, writes variations of your ad copy and chooses which landing page to send people to. AI Max is becoming the default setting for new Search campaigns, and Google has moved the automatic migration of Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max to February 2027.

The message from both platforms is the same: tell us your goal, give us your budget and your assets, and we’ll work out who sees what.

So what’s left for the advertiser to control?

Two things: the creative you feed the system, and the signals you send back to it about what a good result looks like.

When the platform decides who sees your ad, the ad itself becomes the targeting. A Hilux ad showing a tradie loading a tray on a work site will find a different audience to a Hilux ad showing a family heading off on a long weekend, even with identical settings. The algorithm reads the creative, watches who engages, and goes looking for more people like them.

That changes the job. The question becomes “what do we need to show, and to whom, so the system can find them?”

What this looks like in automotive

Creative variety matters more than creative polish. One beautifully produced hero ad per model gives the algorithm one door to walk through. Ten genuinely different ads give it ten. Different buyers, different reasons, different moments: the first time buyer worried about finance, the family upgrading, the tradie who needs payload and towing, the retiree planning a road trip, the fleet manager comparing running costs. Each angle opens up a different audience.

Real people outperform stock imagery. Walkarounds filmed on the lot, a service advisor explaining what a 30,000 km service actually includes, a parts specialist showing why a particular brake pad suits a particular vehicle. This content is cheaper to make than a studio shoot, and it gives the platforms rich signals about who it’s relevant to. It also builds trust.

Service and parts deserve their own creative. Most dealership ad accounts are built around new vehicle sales, with service and parts as an afterthought. In an automated system, a generic “Book your service” ad competes poorly against creative that shows a real technician, a real price and a real reason to book now.

Feeds are creative too. For dealers running inventory ads and parts retailers running Shopping or catalogue campaigns, the product feed is what the customer sees. Clear titles, accurate specs, good photos and correct pricing are creative decisions, even if they live in a spreadsheet.

Automation needs guardrails in a regulated industry

There’s a catch that matters more in automotive than most categories.

Both platforms can now change your creative. Trade coverage of the 2026 backlash names Advantage+ Creative’s silent asset changes, such as cropped logos, added music and rearranged text, as the complaint agencies raise most. On Google, AI Max can rewrite ad text to match the search.

For franchised dealers working within OEM brand guidelines, a cropped logo or an AI-generated headline can breach brand requirements. For anyone advertising prices, an auto-generated line that changes how a drive away price, finance rate or offer is presented can create real ACCC risk.

The answer is knowing exactly which enhancements are on, reviewing what’s actually being served, and keeping pricing and offer claims locked to approved wording. Each Meta enhancement, such as cropping, music, text changes and image expansion, can be switched on or off individually at the ad level, so there’s no excuse for not knowing what’s running.

The signals you send back matter just as much

The second lever is telling the platforms what a good outcome is.

If your campaigns optimise for form fills, the algorithm will find people who fill in forms, including the ones who never answer the phone. If they optimise for clicks, you’ll get clicks. The businesses getting the most from automation are feeding back better signals: qualified leads, test drives booked, service appointments attended, vehicles sold, parts orders that weren’t returned.

That means connecting the CRM, the DMS and the ad platforms properly.

What changes for automotive marketers

The work shifts from building audiences to building assets. Budgets that used to go into media buying time need to go into creative production, and into producing it continuously rather than once a quarter.

The skills shift too. Understanding why a customer buys, what they worry about and what makes them trust a business becomes more valuable than knowing which interest categories to stack.

And the reviewing shifts. When a machine is making the decisions, someone needs to check what it’s showing, who it’s showing it to, and whether the results are real business outcomes or just platform metrics that look good in a report.

The advertisers who win

Automation is a force multiplier. Give it strong, varied, honest creative and clean signals about what success looks like, and it will find customers you’d never have targeted manually. Give it one tired ad and a form fill goal, and it will efficiently scale mediocrity.

The algorithm is now doing the targeting. The question for every automotive marketer is whether they’ve given it anything worth showing.