PPC Hero Conf San Diego 2025: Where AI Meets the Marketer
This was my second time at PPC Hero Conf. The first was back in 2018 in Austin, back when TikTok wasn’t a thing, cookies weren’t crumbling, and we weren’t wondering if an AI bot was secretly clicking our ads. Fast forward to 2025: the conference has taken up residency in San Diego (convenient for me since I live here and our 85SIXTY HQ is a short ride away). While many of the speakers are familiar faces, the content this year had a distinctly AI-driven focus, reflecting how much the industry has evolved in the past seven years.
From AI-powered campaigns to omnichannel optimization, here’s my recap of the biggest takeaways from two packed days:
Day 1: AI Everywhere, But Still Figuring It Out
The first day of PPC Hero Conf felt like a crash course in how much AI has infiltrated every corner of PPC, but also how messy and experimental it still is. Fred Vallaeys kicked things off with “vibe coding,” his term for mixing marketer instincts with AI scripting, prompting, and prototyping. The promise is campaigns built overnight by digital assistants while we sleep, though the reality (at least for now) is marketers still spending too much time teaching GPT not to write awkward ad copy.
That set the tone: we’re not replacing marketers, but we are rewriting our playbooks with AI-shaped pencils. Sessions throughout the day touched on everything from AI-driven landing pages that optimize themselves (which sounds magical if you’ve ever fought with dev teams), to the inefficiencies of paid search where smarter bidding and suppression strategies can stop budgets from going up in smoke. Greg McCoy reminded us that search itself is shifting: the ten blue links are giving way to synthesized, single-answer results, which means content has to be structured and genuinely useful to compete in an AI-powered SERP.
Cristiano Winckler took the big-picture view, arguing that keywords on their own are increasingly meaningless, and that PPC has to evolve into omnichannel demand generation tied to more holistic KPIs like lifetime value or branded search lift. Others pushed for smarter use of behavioral science in PMax, cleaner conversion tracking, and more regular creative refreshes. By the end of the day, the common thread was clear: AI is giving us tools to scale, automate, and predict, but the quality of inputs (data, content, audiences) still determines whether we end up with more value or just more noise.
Day 2: Beyond Google, Beyond Clicks
If Day 1 was about learning to live with AI, Day 2 was about remembering that not everything begins and ends with Google Ads. Joe Martinez made that case head-on, asking why we’re still defaulting to Google when there are plenty of underutilized channels. His examples showed how TikTok, Reddit, Quora, and even podcasts can fill gaps that Google simply doesn’t reach. That message carried through the day: marketers need to diversify, test, and build audiences across multiple platforms instead of hoping the Google walled garden will solve everything.
Other sessions layered in the practical realities of this shift. Aashna Makin argued for prioritizing relevance and traffic quality, not just volume. Josh Slodki gave us a masterclass in how Looker Studio can make messy data digestible (and, dare I say, actually nice to look at). Ben Vigneron reminded us that cookies are still dying a slow death, and future-proofing measurement through incrementality and first- or zero-party data is non-negotiable.
The day also had a slightly darker undertone, with Chester Scott shining a spotlight on the rise of AI-driven bot traffic and invalid clicks that eat away at campaign performance. His Exclusion 2.0 Playbook made it clear that even the best-optimized accounts are vulnerable if we’re not actively cleaning house. Meanwhile, sessions on SEO/SEM integration and underused ad features pointed us back toward a bigger truth: paid and organic strategies are increasingly inseparable, and AI is forcing us to think of them as one ecosystem.
My Closing Thoughts
Hero Conf 2025 felt like déjà vu with a twist. The speakers were familiar. The problems were still here. But the solutions? Now they’ve all got AI fingerprints. From vibe coding to AI-native landing pages, predictive bidding, and bot-traffic defense strategies, it’s clear our jobs are less about pushing buttons and more about guiding machines.
As someone who’s been doing this for over a decade, here’s my takeaway: AI isn’t taking our jobs (yet), but it is taking away excuses for sloppy work. If you’re still running PPC like it’s 2018, the machines will outpace you. If you lean in, test smartly, and keep a sense of humor (because AI will 100% write you a terrible RSA at least once), then it’s an exciting time to be in this space.
It’s not often a PPC conference comes to your backyard, and even less often it leaves you excited to test out half a dozen new AI tricks on Monday.
