🧠 Human + Artificial Intelligence = Perfect Marketing? We tested!

Roberts Ruja
Aug 18
3 min read

1.1. Neil Patel's Facebook Ads Experiment

Neil Patel conducted an experiment with 28 companies running Google Ads campaigns, spending over $7 million over 30 days. Human-generated creatives beat AI-generated ones 68.3% of the time. When the winners were reworked by humans with AI, the AI versions won 75.7% of the time — with a slight increase in conversions ( linkedin.com , youtube.com).

Conclusion: humans provide quality and impact; AI helps expand creative volumes.

1.2. Hop Skip Media's experience with Google Ads

A controlled test showed: human-created ads got 60% more clicks, 45% more impressions, and a lower average CPC ($4.85 vs. $6.05) than AI ( searchenginejournal.com ).

1.3. E-commerce page content: the person wins

Neil Patel's team found that human-generated blogs received 5.44 times more traffic and better customer engagement than AI content (neilpatel.com ).

1.4. The battle for SEO positions

Highwire observed that human content appeared twice as fast in Google ranking results, was ~16 positions higher, and generated more quality traffic and “top-10” keywords — AI simply didn’t perform as well ( highwirepr.com ).

1.5. Video Marketing and AIGC

In Imalent's TikTok campaign, AI-generated videos received 8x more organic views (189,450 vs. 24,516), 2x more paid views, 4x more likes, 7x more saves, and 2x more comments than designer creations ( reddit.com ).

1.6. The case of Borzoi marketing

AI ads delivered 3x higher CTR, but 9.5x lower customer acquisition and 2.5x higher CAC compared to human-generated banners. Google Ads version of AI texts had 26% lower CAC and 32% better “View-Through Conversion” ( bestmediainfo.com ).

1.7. Big Brands: The Yum Brands Experience

Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC) piloted AI communications to drive double-digit increases in engagement and design; used continuous data optimization to personalize emails and remarketing ( wsj.com ).

2. Scientific results on human-AI cooperation

Meta-analysis (300+ studies): Human + AI team outperforms AI or humans alone on tasks that require creativity. However, human + AI can also be a hindrance if AI does not outperform humans alone ( arxiv.org ).
Experimental platform MindMeld (2310 participants): human+AI teams produce 60% higher productivity. At the same time, quality and CTR were on par with human teams ( arxiv.org ).

3. Why does human + AI work?

Creativity : Humans provide emotional depth and brand authenticity; AI provides idea generation and optimization speed.
SEO and authority : Human content dominates in terms of traffic in the long run.
Engagement & cost efficiency : AI drives high engagement and lower costs, but humans drive conversions and trust.
Marketing Power : Yum proves that the combination allows for personalized, timely offers with greater returns.

4. Potential objections and solutions

Problem	Solution
The “plasticity” of AI-generated content	Supplement with a human emotional touch and proofreading (to further maintain an authentic voice).
Low SEO positions for AI content	Maintain human-generated content in key SEO campaigns, use AI for idea generation.
Consumer insecurity towards algorithms (algorithm aversion)	Clearly communicate collaboration ("human-edited AI material"), increasing trust ( en.wikipedia.org ).
The critical quality of Northern creativity	Start with AI sketches and human-edited versions; A/B test.
Technical readiness and data requirements	Create an AI-ready data strategy, transparency, and privacy guidelines ( deloitte.wsj.com ).

5. Recommendations in Rapid style

A/B test content in both AI-only, human-only, and hybrid forms.
Track CTR, CPC/CAC, engagement , as well as conversions and SEO results.
Interpret data in context (e.g. AI higher CTR but low conversion).
Maintain your brand voice — create “content guidelines” for AI tools as well.
Combine data and intuition — data-driven decisions + creative adaptation = Rapid results.

6. Conclusion

Perfect marketing in the digital world of 2025 is a collaboration between humans and AI: AI facilitates the process, ensures quantity and data efficiency, while humans give content heart, emotional resonance and a foundation of trust. We see that in America's Fortune class (Yum), e-commerce, SEO and advertising - a combined approach works best.