Will Local Promotion Replace Traditional Ads?

Introduction: An Increasingly Visible Shift

Over the past decade, whether on Ocean Engine, Tencent Ads, Baidu Marketing or Google Ads, advertising optimization has consistently followed one principle: give advertisers more control.

Advertisers could choose:

• •Target audiences;
• •Interest tags;
• •Regions and delivery times;
• •Bidding methods;
• •Creative combinations;
• •Conversion goals.

A large ecosystem of ad optimizers, agencies and managed-service providers created growth for businesses by mastering these complex capabilities.

Since 2023, however, a new trend has steadily become the common direction of advertising platforms worldwide:

Google launched Performance Max (PMax), Meta introduced Advantage+, TikTok continues to strengthen Smart Performance Campaign, and Ocean Engine keeps advancing intelligent products such as Local Promotion and Universal Promotion.

Many advertising professionals have begun asking: Will Local Promotion replace traditional ads?

The answer may not be a simple yes or no. The advertising industry is entering an entirely new era of AI marketing.

Chapter One: From Manual Optimization to AI Optimization

Advertising platforms have broadly evolved through four stages:

◈Stage One: Manual Media Buying

Operators had to build campaigns, define audiences, adjust bids, screen keywords and optimize creative manually. At this stage, optimization experience determined advertising performance.

◈Stage Two: Semi-Automated Optimization

Platforms introduced automated bidding, intelligent audience expansion, automated creative and automated budget allocation. AI handled part of the execution while operators owned strategy.

◈Stage Three: Black-Box AI Media Buying

After Google launched PMax, a clear change emerged: advertisers no longer needed to tell the platform “who should see this ad”. They instead told it “I want more conversions”, leaving the remaining work to AI.

Meta Advantage+ follows the same approach, as does TikTok Smart Campaign. The direction of Ocean Engine's Local Promotion closely matches the direction of global advertising platforms.

Chapter Two: Why Are Platforms Advancing AI Advertising?

Many advertisers feel that “we used to be able to adjust campaigns ourselves, but now we have fewer and fewer controls.” This is a deliberate platform strategy, driven mainly by three factors:

1. Lower the Barrier to Entry

Traditional ads require specialist knowledge. Many local merchants do not even know the concepts behind CPM, CPC, CPA, OCPX, ROI or conversion attribution. AI aims to turn advertising into a simple sequence: upload creative → set a budget → start promoting. Platforms want more small and midsize merchants to launch campaigns independently.

2. Improve Overall Advertising Efficiency

For platforms, AI offers computing power far beyond human capacity. It can analyze clicks, dwell time, comment engagement, conversion paths, user profiles and historical transaction data in real time. In theory, AI can find prospective customers faster than people can.

3. Reduce Human Intervention

In traditional advertising, the capabilities of individual optimizers vary enormously. AI aims to establish a unified delivery model. For platforms, that means more stable performance, lower service costs and higher advertising revenue.

Chapter Three: Why Do Many Advertisers Find Local Promotion Difficult?

Although the direction of AI is clear, Local Promotion still faces a number of practical challenges:

• ✕Black-box algorithms: Advertisers find it increasingly difficult to understand why a campaign scales today, stalls tomorrow or cannot spend its budget. Platforms offer limited explanations, and there is less room for direct optimization.
• ✕Heavy dependence on the learning phase: Frequent campaign changes can force the model to learn again. Many merchants become trapped in a vicious cycle of change, relearning, weaker performance and more change.
• ✕Creative becomes the primary competitive advantage: AI increasingly depends on creative quality. Future competition will look more like content competition than parameter competition. Metrics such as “first 3 seconds of appeal” and completion rate now carry enormous weight in advertising performance.
• ✕Organic traffic and advertising are converging: Advertising increasingly acts as an accelerator for strong content. If an account does not publish consistently, paid performance will often suffer as well. The boundaries between content operations, livestream operations and advertising are therefore becoming blurred.

Chapter Four: Will Local Promotion Completely Replace Traditional Ads?

The answer is: not in the short term, but roles will be restructured over the medium and long term. A two-tier model may emerge:

• ✔Tier One (automated AI media buying): Suitable for smaller budgets, local merchants, standardized operations and rapid acquisition.
• ✔Tier Two (professional advertising systems): Suitable for brand marketing, nationwide markets, cross-channel integration, granular operations and data analysis.

Chapter Five: What Does This Mean for Agencies?

In the past, an agency's core strength was knowing how to optimize ads. In the future, the ability to build campaigns and adjust bids alone will not create a durable advantage. Real competitive strength will come from:

Advertising is only the gateway to traffic, not the whole of growth.

Chapter Six: Marketing Trends for the Next Five Years

• 1AI becomes the default optimizer. People will focus more on strategy than daily parameter changes.
• 2Creative capability determines delivery performance. “Creative is targeting” will increasingly become reality.
• 3First-party data becomes more valuable. Membership, owned audiences, CRM records and transaction data will become essential inputs for AI learning.
• 4Omnichannel operations become standard. Data from advertising, search, content, livestreams, owned audiences and physical stores will connect more closely.
• 5Growth services replace simple media-buying services. Businesses will buy complete growth solutions, not merely outsourced campaign placement.

Conclusion

Whether Local Promotion will replace traditional ads is not the most important question. What matters is that advertising platforms are evolving from “tool platforms” into “AI operating platforms.”

Competition between businesses will no longer be limited to advertising accounts. It will be a contest of content, data, customer assets and operating capability. Those who help businesses build a complete growth loop, rather than merely manage ad accounts, will be more likely to establish a durable advantage in the industry's next transformation.