With seismic shifts underway in the media buying field, The Drum Network hosted a panel to discuss where the discipline is today – and where it might be headed.
Perhaps no area within marketing has felt the sands shifting in recent years more pointedly than the field of media buying. Industry figures have even suggested it may be the first casualty of AI. Privacy changes have exacerbated this squeeze as buyers have less user data to help them target advertising. The traditional marketing funnel is breaking down, while automation is putting the pinch on personnel.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There are new developments in measurement, while omnichannel advertising offers new opportunities aplenty. Some even say, whisper it, that the move to automation and AI might usher in a golden era for creative – but, we’ll get to that at the end.
Let’s start on a positive note. Liam Wade, director of performance at Impression, describes the current moment as a ‘really exciting time’ in media buying. “Never before have you had so many competitors that you can guarantee are probably trying to do the exact same thing as everyone else,” he explains. “So if everyone else is doing those things, then what can you do?”
Panellists worried that the industry was full of people trained in skills that might become obsolete in three years, but also argued that automation hadn’t completely rewritten the rulebook.
Mary O’Brien, programmatic media director at PMG, says the rise of universal campaign types, such as Google’s P-Max and those offered by Meta, could lead to a world in which: “we’re essentially siphoning off budgets by platform and then they’re auto-optimizing across their formats and the funnel. So I think that evolution is a little scary”.
However, she’s quick to add: “I think media buyers and planners alike are not ready to give up that level of control yet.”
Team design
For Claire Stanley-Manock, paid media director at connective3, this feeds into a wider question of team design. Explaining that her agency is only four-and-a-half years old, she says it had initially moved towards PPC and social specialist roles, before rolling resources back into one pool.
“It was making communication a lot trickier, and just wasn’t as effective,” she says. “So then we took the decision to roll it all back in again. And then, of course, you have the question around, like Jack of all trades, master of none.”
It’s worked out ‘brilliantly’, though, she adds. “We have a mixed team, which lends itself to demand gen, YouTube, advantage, plus meta, all those kinds of things. So we have one person managing all of it, and they can make the best decision for that client.”
Ang Dahir, vice president of media planning at Jellyfish says that client-facing roles are still indispensable. “Clients still want to be treated the same, the bigger that they get, so they want you to still speak their business and language. You still need someone to play that role. But your investment teams can be more focused and specialized on cross-channel opportunities, etc. The client service piece just becomes more critical in those cases.”
Chris Ebmeyer, senior vice president and director of media services at 160/90, says that while automation is indubitably changing team dynamics, it’s also opening up opportunities.
“I think you might start to see a lot of new competitors come into this space,” he explains. “Because you can take a team of five people and AI is going to now allow you to go into the marketplace with an offering that is almost as good as some of the larger shops because you just need specialists… I think it could be an interesting time in terms of agency offerings.”
New media avenues offer more cause for optimism, says Rachel Owen, senior director of client services at M&C Saatchi Performance. And, have surprisingly, helped introduce her team to more traditional channels too.
“There are more ways to buy those platforms digitally now,” she explains. “The team is upskilling across platforms that they’ve never had experience of working with before. We’re working with connected TV, digital, audio, and all sorts. It’s providing us with a more holistic media mix than we’ve ever had.”
Aengus Boyle, senior director of media at VaynerMedia EMEA, says this shift offers potential new routes for creative to come to life. “There’s a big opportunity now to be more socially led, and to start with relatively small creative bets,” he says. “As you see things gaining traction, you can scale those up so that by the time you get to something that’s a big production-value TV commercial, you have confidence that this will resonate with consumers.”
He gives the example of an idea for a client that began as a piece of TikTok content. After going viral, it was upgraded to run on connected TV and soon had outperformed all the client’s traditional TV advertising.
Essential creative
Ebmeyer had more to say on the changes underway to the traditional marketing funnel model. “Many clients we’ve talked to went very heavy into the performance space for a long time,” he says. “And I think what they started to see was brand awareness begin to drop slightly.”
The funnel was perhaps broken, he says – plus, people are human so ultimately they don’t behave in predictable ways.
“Brands are beginning to realize they need this holistic view, and they need a new way to measure it,” he explains. “That‘s where we‘re starting to see a lot more brand perception studies coming to market, looking at brand awareness and brand consideration. And those are starting to be the benchmarks that we‘re looking at.”
Wade says this context is increasingly important. “Brands starting to realize that they‘re part of a bigger system, and they can‘t just be reporting on Google Ads anymore. They need to be looking at the incremental impact of their channels. So, a lot more incrementality testing as well.”
Despite the fears around the damage AI might do to media buying, Boyle says a silver lining could be found in the area where human input is still essential – the creative.
“I think the key thing as we move towards more and more automation in the media space, is that creative is becoming the variable that we can control and optimize,” he says.
Feature Image Credit: Greg Johnson via Unsplash
