ADworld Experience 2026: What I Learned About PPC, AI, Automation, and Creative Strategy

AI tools are becoming an important part of PPC workflows, but understanding how they work is just as important as knowing which tools to use. The focus group on AI tools for PPC explored their technical side and how professionals are incorporating them into their advertising processes.

My takeaway: AI becomes more useful when you understand the specific problem you're trying to solve. The goal should be to improve how work gets done, rather than introduce tools without a clear purpose.

One discussion that caught my attention was the potential of combining scripts with AI to improve everyday PPC tasks.

Campaign management involves repetitive activities that can consume considerable time. Automating suitable tasks can help reduce manual effort and make workflows more efficient. The important consideration is identifying which tasks are worth automating and how to make the resulting workflow useful for campaign management. This is an area I want to explore further at SIB Infotech.

The Meta Ads focus group covered what was working, what wasn't, and how different advertisers approached creative development.

One key learning was the importance of examining campaign experiences rather than relying on assumptions about what should work. Different advertisers face different challenges, and understanding their approaches can help generate ideas for testing and improving our own campaigns.

ChatGPT Ads also came up during the discussions, with participants sharing their experiences and some of the tracking challenges they had encountered.

This was a useful reminder that exploring a new advertising platform involves more than understanding its audience and ad formats. Measurement matters, too. Before drawing conclusions about campaign performance, advertisers need to understand what they can track, where the limitations exist, and how those limitations affect their decisions.

The LinkedIn Ads focus group was particularly useful because we discussed applications beyond conventional lead generation.

Event marketing and other B2B initiatives were among the areas explored. For businesses, this opens up a broader way of thinking about LinkedIn Ads. Campaigns can support different marketing objectives depending on the audience, offer, and business goal. The lesson is to evaluate the platform based on what the business wants to achieve, rather than limit it to a single use case.

TikTok Ads was not a service we had introduced at SIB Infotech, so I was interested in learning how other professionals were using it.

The conversations also covered TikTok Shop in the US. Speaking with people who actively work with the platform gave me a better understanding of its possibilities and the approaches advertisers are taking. For an agency, these discussions are useful when evaluating whether a new platform could serve existing clients or open up relevant opportunities with new ones. The decision to introduce a service should come from understanding its potential and relevance, not simply because a platform is gaining attention.

Creative fatigue was another important topic during the event.

We discussed how advertisers identify which creatives are working, approach creative testing, and decide what changes to make. The challenge is to understand when a creative needs attention and what to test next. Changing an ad without understanding its performance can make it harder to identify what actually improved or weakened the results. A more considered approach involves examining the available data, identifying the issue, and testing changes that can provide useful answers.

One of the most valuable parts of the first day was the Meta Ads Live Clinic.

Three companies presented their campaign experiences, shared data, explained what they had tried, and opened their cases for discussion. What I appreciated was the opportunity to examine the decisions behind the campaigns, including what had worked, what hadn't, and what could potentially be improved. These discussions offered something different from a presentation focused only on successful outcomes. When practitioners share their actual challenges, other advertisers get the opportunity to consider different approaches and question their own assumptions.

Attending ADworld Experience was different from attending conferences where I could immediately connect with fellow Indian professionals.

There were no fellow Indian agencies around me to relate to my everyday experiences, and Italian was the primary language for much of the local audience. That made the experience a little more challenging, but it also gave me the opportunity to interact with professionals from different backgrounds and hear perspectives shaped by different markets. The experience reminded me that our usual way of approaching a campaign is only one way of looking at the problem. Listening to how other practitioners work can help us identify alternative approaches worth exploring.

Some of my favourite moments happened outside the focus groups.

I had the pleasure of meeting Gabriel Benedetti from Clickable, who gifted me a copy of Ponderings of a PPC Professional by Kirk Williams. It was a thoughtful gesture and a great example of knowledge-sharing within the industry. I also spent an evening with Thanasis from Greece, who works at Eurobank. We exchanged thoughts about the focus groups, explored Bologna's city centre, and enjoyed the local food. I attended a wonderful session by Navah Hopkins from Microsoft Advertising on the connection between Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn. And a special thank you to Gianpaolo Lorusso, whose efforts made ADworld Experience possible.

These interactions were an important part of the overall experience. Conferences create opportunities to learn from people you might not otherwise meet, and those conversations often continue long after the event ends.

The biggest takeaway from ADworld Experience is that learning about a tool, platform, or strategy is only the beginning. The next step is to evaluate how that learning applies to a specific business and whether it can help achieve better results. Some ideas may improve existing campaign workflows. Others may open up new possibilities for clients. And some may require further exploration before they make sense for our services. That's how I want to approach these learnings at SIB Infotech: understand the opportunity, evaluate its relevance, and identify where it can make a practical difference.

Thank you once again to Gianpaolo Lorusso, Navah Hopkins, Gabriel Benedetti, Thanasis, and everyone I had the opportunity to meet in Bologna. ADworld Experience 2026 gave me plenty to think about, several ideas to explore, and another reason to keep learning from the global PPC community.

I look forward to returning next year.