Microsoft's Performance Max could easily replace marketing departments with AI

Microsoft released Performance Max on its Microsoft Advertisement platform, and starting today, it is available globally to every customer, personal and commercial, who wants to employ AI capabilities to take their marketing efforts to the next level.

Yes, you heard that right: Microsoft is bringing AI into marketing with Performance Max, and the Redmond-based tech giant promises that the results of using this platform will match those achieved by a professional marketing team, without the hassle, of course.

Performance Max (also known as PMAX) is a new campaign type enabling you to work with best-in-class AI for your campaign management, from building your assets to finding your audiences, all to bring you better results in one hassle-free campaign.

Microsoft

The platform’s most important capability is the automatization of a marketing campaign through AI means. In other words, users will be able to come up with a marketing plan that contains goals, certain KPIs, signals, and assets, and Performance Max, through its AI capabilities, will take that plan and implement it automatically.

The platform will make use of a streamlined setup for multi-format, cross-channel optimization that will bring users more conversions; as the marketing plan is set in motion, Performance Max will also suggest recommendations to meet the end goals of the campaign.

As you can see below, this is how Performance Max implements the marketing campaign.

It’s also worth mentioning that Microsoft’s Performance Max will be able to import marketing campaigns from Google Ads, and third-party platforms: in the first case, the Google Ads campaigns will be automatically transformed into a Performance Max campaign, while in the second case, the platform will import campaigns as smart shopping or DSA.

The steps to implement a Performance Max campaign are quite simple, and Microsoft explains it in detail, in the official blog post, stating that users will need to:

1. Define their goals.
2. Add creative assets.
3. Create audience signals.

Once those are done, Performance Max will automatically take care of everything, while also informing users of all the changes.

Microsoft plans to add a plethora of new capabilities to the platform in the following months, including brand exclusions, search insights reports, search themes, and video assets.

The Redmond-based tech giant has integrated AI in platforms in the past, with Copilot in Microsoft 365 helping users with a variety of tasks.

The company also announced the release of Copilot for Sales, which is an AI model specifically tailored for those working in sales. So, are we wondering why Microsoft is trying to come up with AI-based platforms for marketing plans? Not really.