Slow hiring in the biddable media industry

Digital advertising sits front and center of a transitional era. There’s a lot going on in the industry as companies seek to gain efficiency.

Google and Microsoft are the main culprits as they continue to push new automated tactics like broad match, PMAX, Demand Gen, Automatically Created Assets etc.

• Broad Match – algorithmically matches your ad with searches that are relevant to your keyword, even if they don’t use the exact words. This allows for traffic volume with a smaller set of keywords.
• Performance Max (PMAX) – Uses AI/ML to optimize ad delivery across all their advertising channels (text, shopping, display, Gmail, discovery, YouTube, etc) from a single campaign
• Demand Gen – Google’s newest display advertising solution designed to generate engagement across channels from a single campaign.
• Automatically Created Assets (ACAs) – the latest ad builder which helps advertisers automatically generate headlines and descriptions for their search ads based on the ad’s content and audience targeting.

These solutions are designed to be easy for advertisers to quickly create their campaigns. Since the all leverage automated machine learning, best practice dictates that account managers limit changes to the tactic. The platforms literally recommend a “set it and forget it” approach to account management (more on this later).

To cut costs, large agencies are increasingly turning to offshore support for tasks like pacing, reporting, and query monitoring, particularly in new business pitches where they’re deploying offshore talent at the execution level.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, everyone is waiting to see what AI will bring to the industry. Technology (particularly in advertising) is advancing at an alarming rate which is causing decision makers to pause investment and wait for the dust to settle.

Many people have been lamenting all of this as the “death of the industry.” My POV is that advertising is cyclical and will come back around in due time as advertisers need a human decision makers placed firmly between the advertising platform and ad budget (don’t allow Google to hold your wallet for you).

We’re observing that management of all these black box tactics is being enhanced by our specialist teams. Tried-and-true strategies like tiering PMAX campaigns or employing Broad match alongside Exact match has further improved tactical performance.

What else has been going on?

I went to London last week for family reasons and spent some time working from my company’s London Office. As I always do when in London, I spent considerable time shopping or in the pub.

Afro Caribbean music is still huge in the UK and was pervasive throughout my record shop experiences. I had grabbed a few things in a shop called Banquet Records in Kingston upon Thames and, being somewhat out of my usual element while staying in the posh suburbs west of London, I asked the clerk what was cool in the area. Instead of recommending local venues and coffee shops as I had expected, the chap came back with a stack of records:

• London Brew “London Brew” – British Jazz musicians performing music inspired by Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew.” I’m probably not the core audience for this release.
• William Onyeabor “Who is William Onyeabor?” – I am already familiar with his work thanks to the TV Series This is England and one ride to Connecticut in the Nothing tour van several years back.
• Little Simz “No Thank You” – As a long standing judge of book covers, I chose not to purchase this album due to its release over a year ago, coupled with my lack of interest in the one track on the album that I was already familiar with (Gorilla). Immediately after leaving the shop I listened to the latest release from Simz, “Drop 7” and I have seen the light. My assumptions were incorrect and, having delved deeper into her catalog, I now know Simz is insanely incredible. She doesn’t have one style, she oscillates across a spectrum of genres and influences from hip-hop, reggae, jazz, electronic (particularly on this latest EP), and is particularly impressive in the way Simz threads elements from these genre’s together into brilliant songs. I am a convert. I love Little Simz.
• Mogadisco (Dancing Mogadishu – Somalia 1972​-​1991) – This has been in heavy rotation singe I returned. I can’t wait to incorporate “Gobonimada Jira” by Bakaka Band into future reggae sets.
• Doing it in Lagos (Boogie, Pop, and Disco in 1980’s Nigeria) – I love this. It reminds me of the Italian disco Chubby Charles played (the only CD he owned, so he claimed) as we drove through London in his car back in 2019.
• Other purchases: Tenor Saw “Ring the Alarm”, Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes “The Drugs“, Pete Doherty “Kolly Kibber“, the Stooges “Russia Melodia“, Gregory Isaacs “the Border“, and a plethora of Viz, Beano, Panini Euro Cup, Mojo and Peppa Pig books for my kids.