Google Took You Out of Your Own Store, Then Split the Door Six Ways.
Automated campaign types don't just remove manual targeting. They spread one budget across search, shopping, video, and display surfaces you didn't choose, then hand back one blended price for all of them.
The advertiser used to run the store. Now the platform runs it
A dedicated brand campaign once gave an advertiser a direct, controllable channel to their own name and demand. Automated campaign types replaced that with a single algorithm-run objective that decides, on its own, which surfaces get the budget. The advertiser still funds the store. The platform decides who works the counter, and which door they stand behind.
One budget, six doors, one price for all of them
The same automated budget can run across search, shopping, video, display, and other surfaces at the same time, each with a different real cost of reaching a real buyer. Instead of a price per surface, the account gets one blended number averaging all of it together. A cheap door and an expensive one sit inside the same reported cost, and nothing in the interface separates them.
Pricing six unseen doors at once isn't a bidding decision
Setting one target across a blended surface mix means pricing several different audiences at once without being able to see any of them individually, a bet on an average the account can't inspect. Knowing what each surface costs, and which one is doing the real work, takes a record of where demand originated that lives outside the system doing the blending.