Is AI Making Media Buyers Obsolete? Here's the Truth.

Kelly [00:00:00] 'Cause at the end of the day, I think what the media buyer's job is to understand the outcome that they're building towards and to invest dollars to accomplish that outcome. And that is sort of an ethereal thinking where you have to kind of problem-solve for that. And now you have to use the system available to you where it's not literally I'm gonna build this campaign, but I'm gonna work with Meta's AI system, and I'm gonna describe a problem, who I think it should go to, the creative story I have, the reasons to believe, the values, and then I'm gonna see what it's able to build, what it suggests, and I'm gonna massage it.

Kelly And then eventually, when I feel good about this is the right way to allocate this budget, I'm gonna put that in market.

Intro - Outro Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by VoujaDe Digital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms, because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action.

Intro - Outro So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode.

[00:01:00] Hey, everyone, Kelly McGuire

Todd with VoujaDe Digital. I'm excited to talk about today's topic. Hey, Kelly, happy Monday. it's almost- Digital. I'm excited to talk about today's topic. Hey Kelly, happy Monday. it's almost September, hard to believe. and apparently I'm coming to you from out in the ocean on the deck of my sailboat, because I'm not in my normal area or office and so I have this other background on, which happens to be my sailboat, that I wish I was on right now.

Todd And I'm wearing a blue and white ocean shirt. And you're not in your normal backgrounds. You're sitting outside of some corporate office building- ... God knows where. anyway, happy Monday. so I have this topic to talk about today, and it's perplexing me. So here's what I'm hearing, from our internal media people, our head of commercial partnerships, and just sort of the general spin out in the digital marketing atmosphere, and I'm curious what your take on it is.

Todd So here's what I'm hearing lately. What I'm hearing [00:02:00] lately is The Trade Desk or probably any other number of DSPs, but The Trade Desk certainly with, some of their upcoming product releases, and we as The Trade Desk been partners with them since the very beginning. Google, Meta, all these platforms are seemingly trying to automate the entire media buying activity, on their platforms.

Todd So today as an agency we have subject matter expert, media specialists in all those domains. We have specific programmatic people, we have specific search people, we have specific social people, and they're all subject matter experts. They all eat, sleep and breathe their domain specialties, and they're all telling me that, hey, these features are being released in these platforms which effectively- Are, are aiming at making it so that I don't have to do this work anymore, that they will somehow, through [00:03:00] their AI, be able to take on a lot of the media buying process.

Todd And as we've talked about this before, I'm not sure I believe that and/or it's coming out that way, but that's not really what's gonna happen. And so I'm curious for you to explain, 'cause you've had some exposure to this recently. If i- is it really that, first talk about is it really that? Talk about, like, what's really happening kinda behind the walls of these platforms.

Todd What are they aiming for? And then let's talk about as a segue to our separate section after that, let's talk about what does it mean for agencies like ours? What does it mean for people who are media buyers in digital media? what does it mean for advertisers and thinking that, hey, maybe my media buying is now gonna be done super quick and easy, and, maybe I don't need an agency, or maybe I just hire an in-house person, they can do it across all the platforms.

Todd Is that a good thing, a bad thing? Are there [00:04:00] pitfalls to that? Like, let's talk about first what is it, and let's second, let's talk about what does it mean

Kelly Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting topic to think about. I agree with you, this is what is being telegraphed and what the platforms are trying to lower the barriers of entry, and it's in their best interest to do so.

Kelly The more they simplify things and the easier they make it, the lower entry and the, the more people can jump on board and can throw more dollars in, and the more control that they get. and like any form of AI, it's sort of a closed loop training system, right? The more they run, the more decisioning they make, the more accurate they can get, and it does improve over time, and I think that they're trying to build towards that future.

Kelly I think the way that I think about what they're trying to do is they're looking at all of the task management that goes into campaign structure and build-outs and operations that can be very time-consuming, and a lot of times unnecessarily so. having to actually go in [00:05:00] and set up a campaign and pick targeting and assign creative and traffic elements and set bids and all of that, that is very time-consuming, a- aspects, and I think that they are able to automate a lot of that.

Kelly Tha- those are the types of things that AI is really good at. And so I think from when I consider what is valuable on what's happening, that's where my head goes, is what is it simplifying and taking off the plates of what I would call in- unvaluable time and effort. But to answer the second part of the question right away, I think about what does that unlock and what does it still require?

Kelly Because where I sort of fall off the bandwagon of the story is the idea that it's just gonna put media buyers out of a job and there's nothing left for the human in the loop element. It's not necessarily, in my mind, anywhere near -- This is true for any AI, but media AI in particular, simply replacing all of the experience, expertise, [00:06:00] nuance, everything that kinda goes into the decisioning of what to buy, where to buy, why to buy it.

Kelly I do think it simplifies a lot of the layers on how to execute across all of that. I think it can assist in a lot of ways, it can supplement a lot of things, but I don't think it can just take the wheel and do all of that. I don't think we're anywhere near, and I'm not sure we'll ever truly be at a point where you could just put in, "Here's my brand, here's my website, here's my budget, go run and spend it," and it's just gonna work that way.

Kelly I think that there's a lot more subtlety and nuance and decisioning that goes into what are my objectives, what is my value proposition, what are my core ethos, what is my brand, what matters to me, what do I care about, what do I believe, what do I know? So like a lot of things with AI, I think it's carving out the low end and the middle Where you still need that top-heavy experience and expertise to own and guide and control the AI, but it is opening the horizon of what a [00:07:00] really smart person who absorbs and knows a brand and understands how you're trying to use media to influence human behavior online to guide in ways that it can exponentially increase that bandwidth and that, that power.

Kelly It can dive into research, it can look at segmentation. But it's not just gonna do that on its own. You still need to be able to define what are you trying to accomplish, what are the goals, what are the pitfalls, what are the history, the learnings. It's like any other AI. it's, whatever you put in is what you get out.

Kelly it's not just the press the easy button and it does everything for you.

Todd So hypothetically, let's role play. I work in an agency or I work at a client and I'm ... Let's say I've been running Google paid search campaigns. I'm pretty versed at that. I know how to run Google, I know how to run YouTube. I know how to create campaigns, set target audiences, set bid parameters, set all that stuff, and I can run Google really well And now I've gotta run Meta

[00:08:00] ads, and I've never run Meta ads.

Todd Is it conceivable at this current state in your mind that I could go set up a Facebook business manager account and, you know, get the company I work for or I'm an agency or whatever all set up and actually start running a campaign with basically little to zero previous knowledge on how to run campaigns in Meta?

Todd is it supposed to be that easy now that I could do that?

Kelly Yes. I believe that the system is set up to where someone with that level of knowledge could accomplish the task of running Meta ads, the caveat being that person's campaigns will not be as good or well as performed as someone using the same system who does have that background and knowledge and experience and can guide that system in a much stronger, better way and know what to review, what to iterate on, what to accept, what to decline.

Kelly And so again, it raises the floor of can I cross this barrier and do a good enough [00:09:00] campaign, but it doesn't put that same no background knowledge person at the same playing field as someone who does have all of that knowledge and is now able to use that same system to level up where their time and energy is spent thinking about and iterating the campaign further because it saved all the time of the minutia of the setup and the really kinda low-level executional components.

Kelly And so it's a weird thing, right, where it raises that floor of what can be done, but it also raises the ceiling of what can be done with someone who really knows what they're doing.

Todd So are you hearing that in the platforms the actual functions or features of the ad platforms, the UI or whatever, are you hearing anything?

Todd I know you're not hands-on-keyboard in these platforms anymore yourself, but are you hearing or reading anything That discusses or reveals that there's material changes in the ad platform UIs that are really changing how a media buyer would uses them?

Kelly Significantly so, [00:10:00] yeah. So it- they're taking away a lot of the, the detail control over campaign setup and focuses, even to the point of targeting, where you're not necessarily going in and saying, "This is exactly the target audience and who I want to serve this ad."

Kelly Really, your inputs of who you'd like to see the ad or who you believe the ad has value for is really s- treated more as a suggestion and a guidance, almost like a prompt in AI-

Todd Mm-hmm ...

Kelly for it to use. and then the systems are taking the guidance, not just your targeting, but everything you want to accomplish, and then it is formulating the sample and reaction system that comes in.

Kelly So it's gonna go out, it's gonna deliver that ad to a sample audience, it's gonna read the reactions, all of the metrics and data, and it's gonna start to decide what is and isn't well-suited for what's performing, and then it's gonna look for diminishing returns. So again, it's taking the guidance and the inputs and the controls, and then it's taking the reins of [00:11:00] piecing that together, putting it into market, and then using the data feedback of what the outputs are, and using that to guide what next.

Kelly So what, what's working? Where should we go? What is this built for? Which is why creative is so critically important, because now the delivery is just one component. The reaction to the delivery is much more of a direct signal that decides the next thing, and the reaction is so heavily driven by not just who saw the ad, but what did they see and did it matter and resonate?

Kelly So if you were, if you For example, if you wanna put an ad out there and your target is females, and you go and suggest, "I wa- I wanna serve this to a female audience," and the system goes out there, but for whatever reason, the creative that you built resonates with men and they're the ones who get served in the sample, and they're the ones reacting and all of the, the

Kelly it's in there, it's gonna create a confusion signal where the system's gonna say, "It's men who care about this ad, and that's who [00:12:00] actually wants what you're offering, and so therefore we're gonna put the accelerator onto that." And so you have to not only guide what it is that you want the system to focus on and tell it what's important, you have to build towards what's important and actually fulfill that, and it creates a lot of obligation there.

Kelly But then that being said, when the system takes over, is so much of the theory and the hypothesis, it's able to test and prove a lot faster. So rather than having to do an AB test or a multivariate test, it's able to put it out there and get feedback and show you what's working, show you those diminishing returns, show you those saturation rates, and allow you to react to it.

Kelly But again, the system's not just doing all of that in isolation, it is enabling a very smart person or set of people who know how to leverage those tools to go, to move faster, to move smarter, and to do more because of their understanding of how the system was built and what the AI is taking over.

Kelly You're still utilizing the same systems, you're just not actually setting the bids or setting the targeting or doing that anymore. The AI is [00:13:00] doing that for you, but you still have to guide it and react to it. Sometimes it is going to get things wrong. You're gonna have to correct it, and you're gonna have to push through on certain things.

Kelly And so that's why it doesn't remove the human in the loop, it empowers the right people who are using it the right way to, again, reach for a much higher ceiling than was ever there before. But in the converse of that, it does also allow someone who doesn't care about all that to just do good enough, and it'll probably look okay.

Kelly So now we go into that spectrum of outcomes again, right? There's good enough, and then there's excellent, like there's always been.

Todd So this makes me think of a couple things. It makes me think of long before- Programmatic, for example, existed, we had to buy through ad networks. And we didn't have all, we didn't have control of all the levers-

Todd when you had to do that. in this case, you're saying that a lot of the levers are being sort of driven by [00:14:00] automation of the platform. Like, they're saying y- you set certain parameters, but now you're saying the machine learning or whatever the pr- the, the platform is learning and how it can test quicker, and it can do all these things quicker.

Todd Aren't we able to track less information about consumers now on the internet? And so if that's the case, h- I wonder how these systems are working efficiently, right? If there's less data, there's more data privacy and less tracking and a lot of that stuff that's being enabled, obviously with Apple devices and things like that, how do you think the systems are staying smart?

Kelly Yeah, so this is a lot of where the human element comes in as well, which is- Data is the lifeblood of these systems, and it doesn't work-- It doesn't have to be a hundred percent, right? you're typically looking for your waterfall of metrics that tell a story that points in the right direction. But there is a significant risk that if you're not careful, that [00:15:00] looking and operating and decisioning off of incomplete or wrong metrics can absolutely guide these things in the wrong way.

Kelly We see it all the time where we'll audit client accounts that the conversion outcome metric that it, that its campaigns are focused on are incorrect. Either the pixel's misfiring, it's incomplete data, it's double firing. There's all kinds of things. And then that feedback loop that it creates, has a cascading problematic effect that is catastrophic to these campaigns.

Kelly And so the fidelity in which you create these campaigns and monitor them and watch them and set them up becomes exponentially more critical, in these types of systems where you're not as directly in control and you don't have as much, human control you need to feed these systems accurately. And so data architecture, naming conventions, input structures, all of that be- has to be really carefully controlled and fed.

Kelly And then you also have to make sure, that you are monitoring and watching those outcomes, right? Because again, it's not just to set it up once and the whole thing [00:16:00] works. The whole thing is creating the opportunity to create visibility and to make decisions off of, to react to, to feed the next element onto.

Kelly Now again, these are-- I'm describing what this empowers that is really great. I think my biggest fear is what the appetite for great is going to be.

Todd Mm-hmm.

Kelly Because if people are like, good enough is good enough, and it's cheaper and it's faster, and it's as good as I ever expected," I've said this a few times in a lot, and I think this is gonna be a running theme in everything I ever talk about with AI, my fear comes so much less on what is done right and wrong and so much more on missed opportunity of what could be.

Kelly Because there's this element where it's like, okay, we replaced it, we saved time and money and energy, and things look pretty good without ever knowing that with a little extra time and effort and energy to capitalize on technologies and tool sets and capabilities that never existed before, what we were used to as good or good enough could be twenty, thirty, forty, fifty

[00:17:00] percent better if someone bothered to be pushed in this way.

Kelly And it's a big reason why I think that there's problems with, you know, internal teams owning this. there's all kinds of situations where people can get too comfortable. There's, you know, there's all these cliche sayings that exist for a reason, like if it's not broke, don't fix it, or squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all those types of things.

Kelly I think that applies really heavily in media, right? You see so much the lack of proactiveness to push and experiment and do things, especially when things are doing pretty well and no one is complaining, and there's this agency relationship that tends to, or even internal team relationship that tends to be, well, no one's on my back about it, everything's kind of going fine, it's good enough, versus you see it when things aren't going well, when metric, or when targets aren't being hit.

Kelly All of a sudden you see so much more activity. What can we do? How can we be creative? What do we have to solve for on all those types of things? And it's just this, this sea of complacency [00:18:00] that can happen, and I think AI's gonna exacerbate, "Hey, things are just going well. I don't really need to push this a whole lot further."

Kelly And, and if I was a client making a decision, I would be very mindful about whether or not I was suffering from my own success or,level playing field. Because you don't wanna be the problem client by any means, but you also don't wanna have to be in a s- in a relationship where if you're not prompting and prodding and probing and requiring more, it's not happening.

Kelly And we hear this so much in the, in, in the new business pitches and the, in the RFP conversations we have. The number one thing that we get told is, "I feel like I'm not getting enough strategic advice." and I sort of interpret that more often in meaning proactive innovation and ideas and what next.

Kelly And I think AI taking over and simplifying so much of this is going to create a much bigger problem around well, I don't have to be more innovative, I don't have to push through, because things are working pretty [00:19:00] well.

Todd Okay. So what should, in your eyes from what you've seen so far, what should the next gen media, agency media person be really good at?

Todd and what are they even going to be allowed to be good at and be able to do, given the progress with the platform seemingly trying to- Make that not even a thing anymore for that person to be there and do. what's the next gen of that p- person gonna do?

Kelly Yeah. This brings up adjacent another big concern of what I see being a problem in AI, and I'll bring this back around to your question, which is you kind of hear this sort of slightly tongue in cheek element of like, oh, AI's gonna take everyone's job.

Kelly And what I've said is that might be true way down the line in terms of the everyone part, but what I do see on the immediate horizon, I think there's already a lot of this happening, is I very much see it taking [00:20:00] away the entry level and the mid-tier jobs, the things that get people the exposure and the knowledge base and the foundation to do some of the more advanced things that are still valuable.

Kelly And so I think that gap is gonna widen. The reason that I bring that up, to answer your question, is-

Intro - Outro ...

Kelly I think where the human in the loop will stay in is having the historical experience of what Meta Ads used to be, what Google Ads used to be, what the foundation of these systems are. That experience of knowing what it, what went into building a campaign, what went into targeting, what went into delivery and data, and having actually been in there and doing it is what will allow these teams to push these systems further, to question it, to prod it, to, hey, what's the next thing?

Kelly Is this the right decision? What else could we be doing? Do we actually think this is exhausting? I actually don't believe that it's a creative problem, I think it's a targeting problem. Why wouldn't I... asking the questions of the system to take it further and to not just take it at face value, and to be [00:21:00] able to explore what else could we be doing?

Kelly How much more could I be spending in this? At what point, you know, does it make sense to move from this campaign to start up another one? What is the user journey? How much should go into awareness versus conversion? How much education is in there? knowing the questions to prod and the things to react to, 'cause at the end of the day, I think what the media planner's job is, or the media buyer's job is to understand the outcome that they're building towards And to invest dollars to accomplish that outcome.

Kelly And that is sort of an ethereal thinking where you have to kind of problem-solve for that. And now you have to use the system available to you where it's not literally I'm gonna build this campaign, but I'm gonna work with Meta's AI system, and I'm gonna describe a problem who I think it should go to, the creative story I have, the reasons to believe the values, and then I'm gonna see what it's able to build, what it suggests, and I'm gonna massage it, and then eventually when I feel good about this is the right way to allocate this budget, I'm gonna put that in market, and then I'm gonna watch it evolve, [00:22:00] and then as it hits certain good or bad outcomes, I'm gonna keep coaching it.

Kelly And so I think that's a great term to think about. I think the new role of the media buyer is an AI coach, if you will. And who makes the best coaches? Ex-players. You very rarely get a coach who's never played the game before and just came out of it and just went straight into coaching.

Kelly That's not really how it works. I think it's a very apt analogy to what this world's gonna be.

Todd But that's the problem that you're calling out, is that how can you be a player if everything that players played is being now consolidated into the machine doing all that work?

Kelly Yep.

Todd Who's gonna have the wisdom from all the experience of the work in order to be a coach?

Todd Yeah. I don't understand how the coach role exists in 10 years from now.

Kelly It's gonna be a shrinking talent pool, and again, you're gonna have the spectrum of the talent pool, right? You're gonna have the best 10%, the best 20%, the best 30%. I mean, there's gonna be a pool of people to just have the experiences as a whole, and then you're gonna have the [00:23:00] skill set within that experience, and that's

Kelly the top end of that's gonna get exhausted. The bottom end's gonna go into there, and then eventually you're gonna run out of it, and there's gonna be a scaling and a squeeze. Now, the thing that will offset that to a degree is that the skill set of the people who do have some of this experience right now will obviously continue to grow as they continue in their careers, and the AI systems will expand the capabilities of those existing people.

Kelly So what you might have had to hire a new person for before, that one skilled person might be able to take on because it took off some of the, the grunt work and the minutiae. And so again,the other analogy I'll make, it's kind of like moving from what used to be paralegal work into the full attorney work, right?

Kelly Now, the paralegal work might be done by the AI. W- but you're not paying less just because you're not needing the paralegal time. You're still buying the high-priced lawyer who puts this to use and gets the outcome that you want. And, so I don't know the time horizon [00:24:00] of the, the knowledge and skill set shrinkage that's gonna happen from this.

Kelly It's probably many years out. But at some point in the next couple years, I ... that's what I see. Now- Is AI gonna switch, shift to general intelligence and it's gonna be a whole different world that I can't even think of right now? Yeah. Maybe that, you know, offsets some of this. But if everything goes the way it is right now, I do think that's what'll eventually happen, is you will have a set of really good coaches, a set of mediocre coaches, a set of good enough and I've got no other better option coaches, and then you're gonna have a whole pool of I got no other choice, I'm throwing people in and let's hope for the best.

Kelly and it's a threshold and the systems are doing what they can.

Todd So all right, final question, we can wrap up. I ask you this usually in similar contexts in other conversations, but if you're the advertiser, the CMO, marketer, whatever, of a brand today, you're out interviewing for agencies, you're being pitched on all the cool whiz-bang [00:25:00] wizardry of digital media buying and, you know, all that kind of stuff, what- What are some of the probably the most salient and hard-hitting questions you could recite now that you would tell any marketer, "Hey, if you're looking for an agency, or you're hiring to build an in-house media buying, capability," given where the t- the platforms are right now and probably pr- assume probably similar space for the next 12 to 18 months, what would you tell them the talent

Todd Either the talent they should be looking for at the agency should be structured in a certain way with their talent, what would that look like? Or what would your in-house talent need to be structured like?

Kelly Yeah. So if I was trying to vet out what would be the best fit for me, there's a couple of things that I would hone in on.

Kelly The first is I would be much less concerned about what's your tech stack or your tools or your capabilities, all that. I have to assume if I'm talking to you, w- within reason- Sure ... if we talked any further, that you've, you know how to use the Meta platform, you know how to use the [00:26:00] AdWords platform. You have some measurements.

Kelly Like, I have to believe that there's a baseline stack. So I wouldn't bother too much on that because no one's whizzbang technology thing is really any better than anyone else's.

Todd but do you assume they're using it through all the full automation- No ... and they just have somebody there sort of just overseeing it?

Todd Or are you assuming they have the player-coach role that you're talking

Kelly about? Yeah, so that, that's where I would focus a lot more on, is I would wanna make sure that I'm hearing the right things, that there's a, an ability to think about my category and business. I would wanna hear, what is your interpretation of me as a client, my needs, my challenges?

Kelly What do you ... What i- what is your ability to identify and diagnose challenges, and how would you address them, and how would you be able to do it? 'Cause if I have people that can sh- demonstrate to me that they have the ability to interpret and think, not rinse and repeat, "Here's how we run campaigns for everyone and we plug you in," but a, "Here's what I've learned about your business.

Kelly Here's what I think about your business. Here's what challenges I would wanna tackle," that shows me an ability to think. And then the questions that I would really push the [00:27:00] most would be, "Walk me through the problems that you've solved for your clients." Explain, not ... don't give me your best case study of your greatest outcomes because that client could've been set up for success.

Kelly There's a million reasons why case studies are in there. I always joke that no one ever showed a bad case study, right? You're obviously cherry-picking your best stuff. I wanna hear about- When did you run into an obstacle? How did you diagnose it? How did you problem-solve for it? What did you do that wasn't just bidding on meta ads and changing keywords that helped the client's marketing problem?

Kelly How did you identify a sticking point? How did you work through them with it? What happens when you've reached a threshold of just simply changing a bid or swapping out an ad isn't gonna break through? I would wanna hear someone's methodology for that. When things go wrong, when things get difficult, when a competitor enters in, I wanna hear people's adaptability to market outcomes, not capabilities and blueprints that worked for some other client that might have nothing to do with my challenges in reality.[00:28:00]

Todd I don't think we've ever been asked that in an RFP.

Kelly No. Most RFPs are what are you pri- what are you, what is your pricing? who's your team? What's your tech stack? You know, what are your capabilities? And I have no idea how someone would look at the cherry-picked best and brightest pitch that is going to sound variations of the exact same from everyone and decide which one to go with.

Kelly And honestly, I think no one is good at that, which is why there's so many instances of you picked what you thought was good at the real- at the time, find out the reality is very different than what the expectation, get disappointed, rinse and repeat, and go through. That's why I think it's so important that you're not hiring past accomplishments that, from different people, you're not hiring systems that are supposed to be plug and play, that at the end of the day, you are hiring people and approaches and essentially forming a relationship that is critical to your business, right?

Kelly How bought in and invested and [00:29:00] consistent is that team gonna be in solving all of my problems, right? AI is not a press a button and do it for you, right? AI, like anything else, is a tool that is a means to an end, and there are many different tools in the tool belt that apply to different reasons.

Kelly There's research tools, there's creative tools, there's audience tools, there's, you know, user journey tools. there's all these things, and the same tool set is rarely gonna work for the same clients, even in the same industries. A lot of times you just need people that are great carpenters that can build a house with whatever tools are necessary to the blueprint you have in mind and your challenges and your weather conditions and your foundation and all of that.

Todd Okay. Well, I guess there's a lot There's still a lot left unknown. There's still a lot for marketers to try and unpack with their, maybe their agencies, marketing service providers about the evolution of the ad [00:30:00] platforms and really what's the best way their campaigns can and should still be run versus maybe how, just how they can be run now.

Todd Gosh, it seems like it's still ... The, the gap is still significant in terms of being able to use the automation, use the platforms in an automated way and just get by, like you said, get by with a campaign running versus still having a player coach Involved, maybe a strategist, we call him a strategist involved who is, understands how the platforms work, understands the business objectives, and knows how to program the ad platforms to be in the best service of the investment outcomes, in said platform.

Todd Yeah. Still a lot of nuance to that.

Kelly Yeah, I think it's a good way to put it. I mean, I think what I can end with is I can also tell you what I definitely wouldn't want. I certainly wouldn't want people who are [00:31:00] just simply putting my company into Meta saying, this is the brand, this is the website, this is what we're trying.

Kelly This is the KPI. go spend the money." Because in the worst case scenario, it's gonna get a lot of things wrong, and I'm gonna miss a lot of things. I'm gonna get nowhere near my target. And even in a best case scenario, if that works well, if the system can get that right and it can look pretty good, it's only gonna work well right up until it doesn't.

Kelly Doesn't. And then once it reaches the point of, "I don't know the answer anymore," you're not gonna have a team that knows how to break through and to solve it. Yep. And then what you're gonna be- you're gonna do is you're gonna get on a lot of the calls that we get on with a lot of clients, which is everything was going really well and then it fell off a cliff, and my agency doesn't have any answers, so I need to find someone else who can come in and save the day and tell me why did everything fall off of the cliff.

Kelly And I would just never wanna set myself up for that experience. I would wanna make sure that there's a captain of the ship at all times that is guiding this in good weather and in bad. I think I'm using your background as an inspiration- Hey, look at that ... there a little bit. But, [00:32:00] like, it's so easy for things to go well when there's, tailwinds at your back and everything's going in there.

Kelly But you need to set yourself up for success when inevitably a storm comes and you actually need a team that knows what the heck to do at that point.

Todd yeah, absolutely. I mean, I never leave offshore like this thinking about, "Oh, it's blue skies and perfect winds." I always think about what happens when something breaks and what am I gonna do then.

Todd all right, well, thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. It's an interesting dynamic that I'm hearing about, on a al- on a almost near weekly basis, or I'm reading something about it, or I'm talking to one of our media channel directors and they're telling me how, "Oh, Google's trying to automate more of my role and take this out or take that out," or Meta's trying to do this or that, and they're just l- they're decreasing the amount of levers that we have to pull to optimize performance, and they're just building that stuff inside of their machine and now we've lost those levers.

Todd We don't have control over that anymore. And so it's interesting to see where it's going. I don't know that, I [00:33:00] think it's helping any. I can't... I've never heard... I haven't heard any of our people say, "Yeah, as soon as they took over and automated everything and I didn't have to do it, results got better."

Todd I haven't heard that yet. Not at all. so, more on that to come. I think, we can wrap. I think the next Maybe the next show we talk about, I wanna, I'm gonna challenge you to complete your exercise to prompt your Claude projects to show you the work-

Kelly ...

Todd that you put into it so that it can be visualized, so that when you give an output, people don't just assume that's the first pass output that the AI spit out, and you didn't do 29 other things over three days to get to that point.

Todd That might be an interesting show and tell conversation for our next one, which is not gonna happen for a couple of weeks, 'cause I'm going on vacation.

Kelly I think that'll be an interesting topic to go through. How hard is it to use AI to its full potential? Because the answer to that is it can be an, an [00:34:00] unbelievable amount of effort and energy.

Todd Oh, you mean it's more work?

Kelly Oh, it's so much more work. Oh. My head hurts at the end of using it because it opens up so many horizons and opportunities, and if you actually bother to use them, your brain, i- is put through a lot of different problem solving elements.

Todd Can't wait to have you, show and tell some of that work.

Todd So until next time, I'm gonna go jump in the ocean, somewhere far away. I'll see you in a couple of weeks.

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