The ad you approved isn't the ad that ran

Every agency I know has had some version of this week.

You get sign-off on the campaign. And not easy sign-off, either — the whole campaign, eleven days of reviews, two passes through legal and a call where somebody's VP wanted "unlock" instead of "open." Finally it ships. Then a month later somebody forwards you a screenshot of the thing running in the wild, and it isn't what you made.

Nobody on your team touched it. Nobody on the client's team touched it. The ad network rewrote it, because a setting that nobody remembers switching on was switched on.

Meta says so out loud, in a help page, in a sentence flat enough to read straight past: "The media and text you upload may be adjusted to help improve ad performance while maintaining the core message of your campaign." Google is blunter still — in Performance Max, text customization is on by default, and while it is, Google can write its own headlines and descriptions for you out of your landing page, your domain and the assets you handed over.

On by default. In a business where the entire client relationship runs on approvals.

Two completely different things walk around under that name, and agencies mix them up constantly.

It isn't AI, and it isn't new. Long before any of us were talking to chatbots, creative automation meant this: you build one master layout, you plug in a product feed, and the system spits out the four hundred sizes and the eleven languages. That's the job. It's a genuinely good job — I've had designers lose entire weeks to resizing, and getting those weeks back is worth real money.

What it doesn't do is decide anything. It doesn't art-direct, it doesn't judge, and it has never once known what your client's ad should say. Vendors have bolted generative features on top since, which is where the confusion comes from, but assembling a variant and inventing one are not the same act.

The modest version of that claim lives in the documentation. The enormous version is on the homepage.

You bought a platform. Celtra, Bannerflow, Storyteq, Hunch, Smartly, Adobe GenStudio. You've got a contract, a seat count and a rendering pipeline, and your problem is that you can't easily tell whether you're overpaying.

You didn't buy anything, and the network is automating you anyway. This is the common one, and it's the one nobody plans for, because there was never a purchase order to make you think about it. If you've never opened those settings, that's where your afternoon should go.

You've got a designer doing it by hand and you're calling it a workflow. Forty variants in Figma, every campaign. That's a real place to be — it's just worth knowing that it's precisely the thing everybody else is automating.

Google is unusually straight about this. In Performance Max, text customization is turned on by default. With it on, Google may generate its own headlines and descriptions out of your landing page, your domain, your existing ads and the assets you uploaded.

It'll also tell you to feed Performance Max up to fifteen headlines, five descriptions, twenty images and five videos per asset group.

That's a serving recommendation — the machine wants inventory to test with. It is not evidence that more variants make better advertising, and Google doesn't claim it is. That's a leap the industry made on its own.

So: go into your Performance Max campaign settings and find text customization. Decide on purpose whether it stays on, because it can be switched off. Then compare what's actually being served against what you uploaded. If a client approved that copy, the copy running may not be the copy they approved.

Meta's list is longer than most people expect. Its help page names around thirty creative enhancements — text generation, text improvements, background generation, image generation, translations, video subtitles, sticker CTAs and the rest — and labels sixteen of them as using generative AI.

On which of them are switched on for you, Meta publishes one sentence: "Some enhancements may be turned on by default, but you can turn them off at any time." It does not say which ones. Availability also varies by ad format, by placement, by whether you're running a catalogue, and by vertical — financial services, health and political advertising don't get immediate access to all of it.

So there's no version of this you can look up. The only way to know what's running on a client's account is to open that account and read the enhancement list yourself.

Which is the part worth carrying out of here: if a client has signed off on exact wording, that sign-off does not survive an enhancement somebody left switched on.

I went looking for what ten of these platforms charge and came back with almost nothing.

Hunch's own marketing puts it from €2,500 a month — on an annual commitment, plus a percentage of whatever spend you route through them, so treat that as a floor rather than a number. Storyteq will tell you the shape of the deal, a one-off implementation charge plus an annual licence, without ever attaching a figure to it. Celtra says talk to sales. The rest simply don't say.

Enterprise software has sold this way for thirty years. But if you're a twelve-person shop trying to work out whether this category deserves a line in next year's budget, you can't find out without booking six discovery calls — and you already know how those go.

Every system in this category multiplies your output. None of them has shown me that the multiplication is what wins.

I went looking for the study — something holding targeting, budget, audience and creative quality steady, showing that variant count on its own moved the number. I couldn't find one from either ad network, or from any platform I checked. Google recommends an asset count, Meta describes a benefit, and nobody shows their working.

Producing four hundred sizes without a human doing it by hand is a real saving, and the saving is the entire point. The quiet second claim is the one to push back on — where volume gets sold to you as performance.

Creative automation assembles. It resizes, it localises, it swaps a product shot against a feed, and it pushes the result live. All of that is worth having.

It doesn't decide what the ad should say. And what the ad says is the part your client is actually paying you for — the thing you spent eleven days arguing about, the reason they hired an agency instead of a print shop.

So here's the afternoon, and it costs nothing. Take your last five campaigns. Pull what was actually served, and diff it line by line against the copy the client signed off. Then open the settings — Performance Max text customization on Google, the enhancement list on Meta — and decide on purpose which of them stay on.

Do that, because right now you don't know whether the campaign your client approved is the campaign that's running.

What is creative automation?

You build one master layout, plug in a product feed, and the system produces the sizes, the languages and the format cuts. It long predates generative AI, and it automates assembly rather than ideas.

Is creative automation the same thing as generative AI?

No. Automation assembles variants from assets you supply; generative AI makes new assets. Vendors have added generative features to automation platforms, which is where the muddle comes from — but you're buying two different capabilities and it's worth knowing which one you need.

What does creative automation cost?

Hard to say. In a September 2026 check across ten creative-automation platforms, one figure was readable without a sales call: Hunch's own marketing puts it from €2,500 a month, on an annual commitment plus a percentage of the ad spend you route through them. The rest price in a meeting.

Can I turn off Google's automatic creative?

Yes, but feature by feature. Google Ads Help states that Performance Max text customization is on by default and can be switched off in setup or campaign settings. Other automatic creative features carry their own separate controls, so go and look at the account rather than assuming one switch covers it.

Is Meta really changing my ad copy?

Possibly — it depends which enhancements are live on the account. Meta's own help page for Advantage+ creative says "the media and text you upload may be adjusted to help improve ad performance while maintaining the core message of your campaign," and that "some enhancements may be turned on by default," without naming which. It lists around thirty enhancements in total. The only way to know is to open the account and read the list.

Does this replace designers?

It replaces the resizing, and good riddance to the resizing. Nothing in Google's or Meta's published documentation claims these systems art-direct, and I'd be careful of anyone who tells you otherwise.

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