The Right Questions About Agentic Media Buying No One Is Asking

Kelly [00:00:00] you can't just endlessly squeeze out productivity and the ability to juggle multiple things and thoughts in this, I mean we already have this AI brain fry, which I myself experienced tremendously.

Kelly 'cause I am too capable of doing too much with AI at my disposal that I do move too fast and it,creates these problems and I think you'll have a lot of people that do that. So that's a big problem right there, is you can't just endlessly. Squeeze out extra focused attention at cheaper and higher scale cannot be the problem at high level, high engagement intelligence work in that front.

Intro Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by Bo Jee 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. So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode.

Intro Hey

Kelly everyone. Kelly McGuire with IDE Digital. Excited to talk about today's topic.

Todd Hello Kelly, it's Todd, your [00:01:00] partner, and I'm back from spring break and next week you get to go on spring break, which is fun. And apparently we both got the dress code to wear the ubiquitous black t-shirt today.

Kelly It's technically for a green, but Yeah.

Kelly Oh,

Todd can't tell. On camera looks black. okay. So, I did my usual sleuthing around the internet today to find some stuff that we could debate and try to, Call out and I found, a recent article on Digiday, from Sam Bradley. It was posted a couple weeks ago or about a week and a half ago, about the Indie Media Shop Butler Till, whom I have known about for a long time.

Todd and they published a case study in conjunction with PubMatic about running sort of the first Agentic media buy. And this in our world is what is. Sort of the hype around this is, oh, this is the agency killer. and it's funny that an agency in PubMatic did this because I think in your words earlier, well, if it was really all that [00:02:00] successful, they would've just killed themselves.

Todd but it's not really about that. it's about, I think, testing what's possible. Even though we know now it's still very, very early stage and not perfect, but it's certainly casting light on what could be possible. In the future and the, the TLDR on this is that thematically what it suggests is like everything we're seeing and reading and testing ourselves is that the technology certainly has the probability of fast tracking, and, and creating efficiency in some of the really low entry level execution layers of, of media.

Todd Planning, and campaign setup and things like that. It is certainly not demonstrating anything yet around the critical thinking, the business intelligence and all of the decisioning layers that go into what's actually required to run a campaign that delivers business outputs. But, having said that, so, so here we [00:03:00] go.

Todd we have Butler Till and they basically. through, I think a product called Adcp, or they used an MCP and they connected that to PubMatic. and they basically built a campaign in which they, they eliminated the DSP. So the DSP fees were then applied to working media. So. The advertiser got more working media dollars placed.

Todd and as a result, apparently the, the results were, you know, things increased and, and it probably just increases a na natural co-factor of the media increase. So of course you're gonna get more stuff like that. but you read it and it's kind of hard to ignore that in this, you know, they. They claimed have had an 80% reduction in supply chain costs and that that all went [00:04:00] back into working media by using an agentic platform or system.

Todd And so are, is that threatening? Is it, are we just gonna cope with this? Are we gonna find a way around it? It looks like, you know, it looks like it's gonna be this disruption, but. 'cause if you're the cmo, you're reading this going, whoa, they've got, they've got faster media and cheaper media and the same performance are better.

Todd I just build that. I don't need an agency. I don't need to pay them. I'll, I'll just build that. So, there's probably a lot skipped in that and what I'm saying and, and the fact and this idea that, oh, well the machine just did this. Right. and I think the takeaway is no, the machine. Just sort of executed a plan that a whole bunch of humans had to put in place.

Todd And so I wanna transition over to you there and talk about like what is the illusion that this is creating? And I don't really care about it coming from our point of view as an [00:05:00] agency. I care about it more from if I'm a marketer and I read this article, you know, would I believe that? Or would I believe parts of it, or would I just scratch my head?

Todd Or would I, how would I think about that? How should they think about that?

Kelly Yeah, so I have a lot of thoughts around this. It's a very interesting topic for me that, I think there's a lot to dive in with, but I think the easiest way to start is to. Break it down into the simple logic test of what is being accomplished, what is being done, what, what are we trying to, to get through and what is important in terms of how we can ultimately figure out.

Kelly What they're trying to fix, if you will, or improve or get better. I think it's really important to think about it from the perspective of what does A DSP really do in the first place? What is the value that it creates, and what do, what is [00:06:00] to circumvent that looking to accomplish? So I think the approach that my, the first thing that strikes me in the approach is immediately assuming that A DSP is inherently bad or.

Kelly Taking too much money or, or not serving value. And I don't think that that's really true. Right? The way that the DSP is structured is meant to be is it is facilitating a streamlined process of organizing all of the supply side partners and all of the components that go into. Purchasing media to achieve outcomes, which is marrying together all of the bid factors, all of the supply side, side of things, what you can bid, the the data layers, the data targeting, the auction elements, the geography targeting, the measurements, all of these types of things, like there's value in what that system brings to the table.

Kelly It's not inherently bad. It is oftentimes misused or misre relied on, or there's a lot of components that. [00:07:00] Create a lot of the problems that make it seem like something needs to be fixed in the process. But if you're using the Trade Desk, or if you're using D DV 360, or you're using one of these platforms really well and intelligently and deeply, and not just tossing it over and letting it go.

Kelly There's really not nearly as many problems if you're truly trying to leverage the tool to its best ability. If you are, again, if you're just trying to use cohi or, or the, the automation tools and all that, yeah, there's lots of problems with that, but you really shouldn't be running it that way anyway, in my opinion.

Kelly And so now it goes down to this idea that there is a value that can be completely eliminated or, or repurposed, is, it's interesting to me to, when you think of it that way, 'cause even if that was true. At the end of the day, like you are securing ad impressions on properties. And so if you were to unlock that, I, I feel like the properties themselves would be like, well, I want a big, bigger piece of that cut.

Kelly I want to make more money on my high value attention on the pages [00:08:00] that people are at, where you're actually serving these types of things. And if you were to recreate the value that DSPs give you, in this case, it's easy to be short of shock value and like, look what we did. Look what we could cut out.

Kelly But if you really did. Enable that kind of value, it's eventually gonna get charged for like, no one's doing that altruistically, no one's doing that and saying, no one's gonna make money. Like PubMatic is gonna make money in this process. The SSP provider's gonna make money in this process. The publisher's gonna make money in this process.

Kelly Like it's not just eliminating the economics of what A DSP built to capitalize and, and to create value so that they could earn money and be valuable. It's just moving the, the, the deck chairs around the deck, if you will, in different ways. Again, right now you can have this shock value as, as Butler till or someone else and saying, look what we accomplish.

Kelly And it's attention grabbing and it's interesting, but it's an outlier in a very small use case with cherry picked information that shows what's possible. It's not stress test under [00:09:00] scrutiny and scale and complication. Right. I would liken it to. Taking, like the analogy I would use is if you take, you know, a sprinter and you say, okay, this person sprinted really fast and completed a hundred yard dash.

Kelly That same sprinter. Well that is very impressive what they did. You're not gonna put them on a football field and they're not gonna be the greatest football player in the world. 'cause there's a lot of skills and talents and things that go to playing football that isn't just running in a straight line really fast and they don't translate.

Kelly Like there's so many things that as you scale and you put scrutiny and you look at what you're trying to accomplish and all the other components that go into placing and buying media, that is not really being accounted for in all of that. And so. I, I look at the complication layers and I look at the practicality of DSPs serve a purpose.

Kelly They should be used very sophisticated anyway, in which case there shouldn't be as much room to do this streamlining it. It's an interesting case in what's possible, and I would take it more as an evolution than a revolution. It does underline that there may be shifting ways in which [00:10:00] these things can be accomplished and ultimately gotten to.

Kelly But I think what you're ultimately gonna find is like everything else that I think AI's gonna do, you're not necessarily going to eliminate all of the economies and, and get rid of all these fees and costs and, and energy. What you're gonna do is you're gonna shift where those costs get applied to what you used to maybe have to pay a thousand dollars for five people to spend, you know, each spend a couple of hours accomplishing a task.

Kelly 'cause it's low end stuff. You're now gonna probably have to pay for one really talented, really smart person who can leverage these tools. And instead of having to put all that time and energy and cost against the grunt work and the things that didn't work through, you're gonna have to have this really skilled person that can leverage this incredible tool to do even greater things and reach greater heights than ever do.

Kelly But you're not. And that's the way that I would be shifting in my mind is you should be paying for greater outcomes and greater talent and greater concentration in value versus saying, okay, well [00:11:00] we got rid of the the grunt work stuff and the things that didn't cost as much, and so now I can pay less for the same outcome.

Kelly Even if that's true, why do you want the same outcome when your outcome could be doubled and tripled if you really leaned into what is possible and what's there?

Todd Alright, I heard you say a couple of things around costs. Where, you know, you talked about somebody's still gonna be making the money, and what I'm leaning into on this is here's an agency, a media agency, I think we've actually gone up against them before, independent agency and, you know, we're, we continue to win and lose business oftentimes based on our fee structure price.

Todd And that's a terrible way to win and lose business, in my opinion. 'cause it does not factor in value. It just commoditizes the relationship. But so be it. and now you have an agency that in theory at some point in time could use this case setting and say, Hey, we're [00:12:00] gonna charge you less than the next guy and we're gonna get you better results and here's how we're gonna charge you less.

Todd We have this AI tech layer now that basically. Took away the time and labor needed for trafficking and campaign set up and DSP, this or that. And now our good people are really just focused on, you know, not pushing buttons and building campaigns, but they're focused on strategy. They're focused on the business strategy and the decision making and, you know, what are we gonna optimize for?

Todd What data do we trust? What signals matter? what trade offs are we making? They're doing that. They're no longer doing all the other stuff. And so in theory, the agency could say, since we've cut all that other stuff out, it saves a bunch of time and therefore we don't have to charge you as much. And you're saying, well, they're gonna make the money anyway.

Todd Probably. 'cause we know that most agencies,

Kelly so when, when have you ever seen the opportunity for opaqueness or, or, or [00:13:00] any kind of ability for value to exist? And it's altruistically always passed along. Never, someone almost always, never takes advantage of. No one knows this exists, no one can see behind the curtains or understands this.

Kelly And so I can just sweep a little bit more over here and make what I think I should be making, but can't really be transparent about and make it

Todd I know, I, I understand that. And so the, the argument I'm trying to make, or the point I'm trying to make is that in the agency's position, they could hypothetically go to market pitching that they can charge less.

Todd Because this is what we're up against. We're seeing this in, in RFPs right now. We're seeing media agencies price work at fees that seemed relative to that budget level 10 years ago. So how could that be? Prices don't go down. They go up, right? And so if that's true economically, the cost of everything goes up.

Todd Milk a car, gas, whatever it is. marketing services costs should be going up, but they're going down the fees that are. That are winning [00:14:00] RFPs right now are less than what they were five years ago. which makes no sense. So how is that made possible? Well, as an operator, it's made possible by scaling volume, reducing labor costs, reducing overhead expenses, all those things.

Todd Right? So how can the agency,

Kelly it's, it its cutting corners or it's making money in other ways that isn't as obvious. Those are the only two answers.

Todd Okay. So let's assume the corner cutting then is the agentic layer, which. Fills in for the lower level, entry level time and labor things. The, the tra ad ad campaign trafficking, all the campaigns set up, right?

Todd Like if you went to, if you went to our media team and said, Hey, we've removed all that bottom layer of like logistical setup of campaigns and trafficking and all that stuff, and nows you have to do is these couple of things. Now that in theory, right, just hear me out in theory, that same team who has utilized it a certain way.

Todd The, the idea is maybe from the agency side is, well, that same team now [00:15:00] can, can take on 40, 50, 60, 80% more utilization. So now the agency's more profitable because that same team, without increasing overhead expenses, can manage more billable dollars. Of media because they're not doing all those entry point level tasks and admin things.

Todd Right. And so that's the idea, I think. What, so you're saying, but Yeah, but the agency's still gonna make money. Well, where they make money is, again, assume expenses overhead doesn't go up, but they increase their revenue utilization of their team by 50%. So now their profit margin's gonna go up.

Kelly But you're, you're missing, you're missing a really, really important component in here and.

Kelly You're treating this like, it's a, like a black and white, zero sum game in that we're not dealing with human beings and biology and things like that. Like

Todd I'm being very specific 'cause I'm being very specific on what the agentic systems are supposed to

Kelly I, I understand. But able to, we're missing a really important component in here, [00:16:00] and I'll go to a few things, but I want to hit on this one point in here, just on it is, let's take everything you just said as as truth, right?

Kelly You can get rid of all the low value, lower value. bandwidth and, and task and all that, and you have so much more ti time and energy to put towards the more sophisticated stuff. I'm gonna come back to that 'cause I don't agree with a lot of that in and itself, but let's just take that at face value.

Kelly That in and of itself has two major problems to it in the cost benefit analysis element of it. The first is you are assuming that even brilliant, intelligent, hyper-productive people have endless capacity to run at full utilization and use their mind across multiple clients, multiple concepts, multiple ideas.

Kelly At the fastest complete element without frying out your brain and completely losing and having burnout on there. So what used to be like, okay, I can take a little bit of a mental load break and maybe write a brief or do something else. If you are now saying you don't get to do that anymore, you have to be hyperfocused and dialed in and doing [00:17:00] high strategy work at eight hours a day so that we can make up for all this lost ground on fees.

Kelly You might not have that person for very long before they have a mental breakdown or completely fry out. Completely

Todd keep mind. I'm not saying this is, this is the case I'm saying,

Kelly but I think

Todd clients are forgetting, expecting agencies to be able to do this. I understand that more cheaper and faster.

Kelly I know, but I, that's what I'm saying is I think everyone is forgetting that.

Kelly In this race for AI and intelligence that the human element, we still have biology, we still have control for it. So other than the fact that you can't just endlessly squeeze out productivity and the ability to juggle multiple things and thoughts in this, I mean we already have this AI brain fry, which I myself experienced tremendously.

Kelly 'cause I am too capable of doing too much with AI at my disposal that I do move too fast and it, it creates these problems and I think you'll have a lot of people that do that. So that's a big problem right there, is you can't just endlessly. Squeeze out extra focused attention at cheaper and higher scale cannot be the problem at high level, high engagement intelligence work in that [00:18:00] front.

Kelly But let's say, let's take that away and say even if you can, let's say you find super people that can do that and are incredibly valuable. You really think that the more valuable and unique those people are, they're not gonna expect to make more and get better. If now I'm doing the job of what five or 10 people used to do, you're gonna pay me the same amount, like the client's gonna get the same value and 10 more clients are getting, get the value out of what I'm doing, and I'm not gonna expect a benefit out of that in some way.

Kelly Like that doesn't pass a logic test. There's no logic where all of this comes together in a. End result person who has to ultimately get the benefit, which is the client who is making money, who's getting the economic value out of all of this, gets to just pay a lot less. And it works the same way. It's always worked.

Kelly Every avenue you go down in what this does, something breaks and there's some roadblock in the logic test of whether or not it works that way or not. Now there are people that will take advantage of the [00:19:00] opportunity to differentiate themselves to tell a story, right? It is very competitive out here.

Kelly Everyone is trying to win a client and have a breakthrough in there, so there will be grandiose promises made and races to the bottom in order to get there. Again, we are all going to run ourselves into a problem zone where it's gonna say, uhoh. Now we've all raced to the bottom. Now we've all, you know, set this new expectation as value and none of us can make it work.

Kelly And there's problems across the board for everybody, and it's gonna be another one of these cycles that, that the system in the, in the industry we're in breaks itself if it's not careful.

Todd Okay. Let me ask the question again more directly, or let's talk about this a little bit more directly. when I talked about these ag agentic systems being built, things we're reading about, even some of the stuff that we're imagining, your imagining and, and our own sort of AI powered operations [00:20:00] system, RAOS.

Todd you've been thinking about ways that people can, our people can. Access query come up with more information faster, because of the, the tech power, right. That sits on, on all that stuff. So again, how does that not fit the same thing that you just described of Well, then our team's certainly going to get overrun by how much they can do in a period of time.

Todd To create more value for our clients that they expect all the while expecting us to work for less money when the really important people cost more money. But again, the tech is supposed to cut a lot of corners, right? So in media planning right now and the logistics of that, what we're reading and seeing and hearing is that these age agentic systems might take away a lot of the entry [00:21:00] level stuff.

Kelly That's the layer of our industry, I think is gonna get killed. The, the ability to get entry level and to grow and to learn and be exposed to it, that, that's a gap that I think is gonna widen tremendously

Todd well. so I'm gonna go back to that then, because this is where I'm saying where if these agent systems can hypothetically really fast track again, creative.

Todd you know, like stuff I'm reading now just almost sounds like it makes, dynamic creative optimization stuff obsolete, not needed. It's already built into the AI if ad trafficking, audience targeting, geography, budgeting, you know, total addressable audience planning and budgeting, like all these things that go into that.

Todd Like, if that can all be done in an ad platform, whether it's Meta or Google or, or you know, something else, TikTok. Eventually those systems are intelligent enough where all that kind of stuff can just be done by the system. You can just simply say, here's the URL, [00:22:00] here's the product, here's an image of the product.

Todd you know, here's a brief, a really, really strategically, well-written, written brief, which maybe that's where a lot of the time and effort goes into. and then all the rest of it can be done genetically. How many hours does that? Cut out. Right? And so again, hypothetically, let's assume that can be done a media planning buying team.

Todd If they don't have to do that,

Todd doesn't that, doesn't that create hours back in the day that they can use for the next campaign or. Three more campaigns in the day that they wouldn't have been able to do before. 'cause they were doing all that trafficking and setting up of the campaigns, right? Like if that goes away. I'm trying to think of a good analogy.

Todd I guess like, I don't know, think of anything where you have to spend a whole bunch of time in the upfront [00:23:00] to get to the end state. And if you don't have to do that anymore, you just, you're just, you just get to the end state. Again, this is all hypothetical, right? 'cause none of this is. Other than this case study, this is the first one I've read where somebody's actually said publicly they've tried it.

Todd Why doesn't that create more hours in the day for a team to work on more billable dollars? Which in theory makes the agency more profitable because they didn't increase overhead expenses and they increased billable capacity.

Kelly Again, if you are using it at its basis layer, absolutely it can, if the majority of your budgets are going towards that lower, that lower level of grunt work.

Kelly But that's always been the layer that you could cut the most quarters. You could always, you could have always outsource that. You could have all, there's a lot of automated things. There's overseas work, there's outsourcing, there's all of that. That's the lowest end layer. Right? And so if some of that gets.

Kelly Made easier. What you're not accounting for is that is [00:24:00] just the lowering of that bottom layer. Yeah. You're not accounting for what it introduces net new, which is capabilities to go further and to do more with data, to explore for further, to get better in every way. That requires a lot more brain power and energy and expertise and experience, which is all about high value things.

Kelly To do better. So again, if your, if your sole purpose is to just save money and keep getting what you've always been getting, you can probably save money.

Todd Isn't that what most clients want?

Kelly No, I, I mean maybe, but it should be, if you're a client is for what I'm getting. I want better than what you used to get.

Kelly Not the same as what I used to get for cheaper, but I want better because better is now possible.

Todd True and that

Kelly takes more true,

Todd true. But okay, fo follow my dumb math here again. Let's say we have a team of six work that works on a campaign and let's say through some ag agentic development, that team, every person on that team gets an hour back in their day.

Todd So now everybody [00:25:00] has, in totality, there's six more hours that can be devoted to the client's campaign and somehow that six hours is used to do other stuff that somehow impacts the. Campaign performance now that client's getting better performance, better output, whatever that is, for the same team and the same money, and I, isn't that what they're all, isn't that what?

Kelly But that's not saving money. What you're, what you're saying is, is is instead of continuing to pay for those six hours, they get reallocated to higher value things. Literally get rid of those six hours. Well, that's one case and pay less.

Todd That's, that's one case in the, in the case study, the Butler Till case study, they actually, their whole point of this case study was they compressed the supply chain fees.

Todd Took those fees and reallocated them to working media.

Kelly Yeah. Again, I, I still have a problem with that. Overall, like I said, I think it's a very cherry picked, very specific area where you're just shifting the [00:26:00] value from the DSP to another provider. And again, you're using this instance right now where you don't have, well,

Todd they didn't shift it to another provider.

Todd They put it into working media. They bought more media as a result of not paying.

Kelly They're still accessing the SSV. There's still money being done there. So again,

Todd yes, but they saved money on the DSP fees.

Kelly Sure, but the DSP wasn't doing nothing. It wasn't just taking fees for doing nothing. They replaced that with somewhere else.

Kelly And like I said, right now, no one needs to monetize that. They're just trying the shock value of, look at we, what we can do. If that were to work, if you were to replace what the DSP was earning their fees are, right? DSPs are not inherently. Evil. They make money for doing a service that is useful and valuable if you do it right, if you replace that useful and valuable service some other way, eventually the value that's created in enabling that process, somebody's going to monetize that.

Kelly It is not going, it's not,

Todd it doesn't mean the agency has to monetize it, it doesn't mean the agency has to to do it. It might mean they still deliver the same or or more to a client for the same or less price. I mean. [00:27:00] It's black and white. If they did not run through a DSP, if they skipped, they literally bypassed the DSP and did not pay those fees.

Todd Let's say that was, you know, $10,000 in the campaign and they took that $10,000 and said, buy $10,000 more worth of ads. That's black and white. They bought 10,000 more dollars worth of ads for the same budget.

Kelly Again, but if it's a, it's a single channel buy, right? If you're going across mobile streaming audio, multi-channel, multi audience targeting, different geographies, different hold assets, all of that, like you, the layering of all of that enablement, it's not a full scale, fully sophisticated area.

Kelly Again, it, in my mind, it probably, look, I don't know the details, I didn't run the experiment, but my guess in the simplistic way it was presented out. Was it replaced all those 80% of fees 'cause dsp, if you're using 'em right, don't charge that much fees if you're using the right DSP in the right way, in the right area.

Kelly It should not be, there should not be 80% of anything to be reallocated. You are misspending if [00:28:00] there's that much meat on the bone. Have you read

Todd all the headlines lately about the DSPs and all the fees they're charging?

Kelly there's a reason I don't use most of them and I don't recommend most of them. We use what we use because.

Kelly We are hands on and we're not like lean off if it's a managed service. If there's other things, yes, there are really bad actors and players out there in there. There are also DSPs that you can use very appropriately and very well in the way that they should be used that do not take that egregious amounts of elements out of the campaigns in there.

Kelly And this is a whole problem that people don't. Even understand the difference in spectrum that exists there. Not all DSPs and not all usage of DSPs is equal by any stretch of the imagination,

Todd of course, but the general sense is that the DSPs make a lot of money in layers that even we as the agency can't see.

Todd I mean, that's just all over. The internet has been, you know,

Kelly you, you, you can only say that if you believe that they don't bring any value in a very complicated buying system in order to allow for the [00:29:00] outcomes that exist. I'm not saying that they don't bring value. It's not as simple as just aggregate inventory and make an auction available.

Kelly There are many more things that go into the layering of a sophisticated campaign that all exists under one house in one system.

Todd It's not saying that they're not valuable, it's saying that you don't always know that they're making money in places that they're making money, and that's, that's a lot have been what's in the headlines.

Todd That's the whole Publicis trade desk. Argument is that money,

Kelly but the money. But the funny thing is the argument is Trade Desk is the most transparent of all of them. That, that, that you do know. It's the, it's a, I can name a whole host of list of other ones that are way more opaque and do make way more than they should, which is why I don't use them.

Todd Well again, I mean the whole article and, and the other stuff that I talked to you about with Open Path and the trade desk and stuff is that there, there are fees being made that aren't transparent. And the agencies, don't know that. And so again, this all goes back to clients want more for less, and if, and, and, and [00:30:00] this case study presents a case where they were able to engineer bypassing A DSP and going straight to an SSPA supply side system, building an agentic workflow, and bypassing the DSP.

Todd And so, yes, it was one small task. One small instance, but everything starts that way. So to think that this isn't gonna potentially spawn more experiments and more ways for things to happen, I think we'd be fools not to

Kelly think that way. Yeah. No thing. Things will evolve, right? This, this evolution happened when DSPs themselves became available, right?

Kelly You used to have the. You used to have the rep that you used to buy your contracts from, and I'm sure at that time people are like, well, the DSPs, they're just remnant inventory and they have all these problems, and I'm the buyer. You only get premium for me and you have to pay these fees. And there's the value in having a human relationship and doing all these.

Kelly And then the DSP evolved. It was not great initially, and then it evolved and it got better and it got more sophisticated. And this is an evolution. I don't know exactly where it will go, but the idea that. [00:31:00] It's just simply going to magically make everything cheaper and easier without other cascading effects of economic value that gets replaced and necessities that exist.

Kelly It's just naive to think that it's like, okay, I can get exactly what I was getting or better for somehow significantly cheaper, and the I'm not just shuffling problems around. Again, even in the very, very best case scenario where these systems do everything they promised to do, which absolutely will not be the case.

Kelly All that's gonna happen is you're gonna shift from a, I'm paying for lower end labor hours to, I'm paying a lot more money for the very smartest people who understand the complication of these networks and can get the best out of them. Or you're gonna think you're paying for that and you're not gonna get that.

Kelly And then it's a whole cascading problems of I'm paying less, but I'm getting worse.

Todd Well, isn't that usually the universal truth? You get what you pay for.

Kelly Yeah. But for some reason no one thinks that they're the ones falling into that trap. It's always someone else that made that mistake.

Todd Yeah. [00:32:00] Well, alright.

Todd enough of that debate. I think it's interesting, you know, we're not on the bleeding edge of things like maybe some other agencies that are bigger and have more r and d budgets in people. And resources to get on that bleeding edge. like this experiment that Butler till did, I think hats off to them that they built, a campaign in this way to at least test what happens.

Todd and if what happened in this case is they bypassed the DSP and all those fees that they would've paid went back into working media. I don't know. That seems like a win to me, but that's a very microscopic, you know, sort of one test, like you said, it's just one little thing. But I then I think, well, that one little thing is gonna lead to much bigger things over time.

Todd and again, to me, it just tells me that the, the technology is probably definitely going to start to weed out [00:33:00] the lower level tasks. Oh yeah. To certain job functions. And as, as a result, what you're saying is who's gonna be left? Our really smart senior strategic people who are the critical thinkers and decision makers that run all of this stuff.

Todd almost, it's almost like we all become strategy engineers. and from what I know, engineers are some of the highest paid jobs out there. So I don't see the labor costs. Of the really good people declining. I see it only increasing. But I do see how there could be a belief that the lower level labor costs would be reduced.

Intro Mm-hmm.

Todd and as a result, some clients are gonna think, well then you shouldn't be charging me as much. and the argument will be, well, we're charging you as much or more because all this technology licensing costs a lot more money and. The labor force that's required to use it now is only senior talent.

Todd [00:34:00] and they cost a lot more money. So in fact. It doesn't make anything go down. It just makes everything more complicated and more

Kelly expensive. We're not, we're not alone in this industry, right? I mean, the legal profession, right? Paralegal work is getting AI out. I don't think lawyers are getting paid less.

Kelly You, your McKinsey consultants, their junior work and their research analyst and their deck building skills is getting out. I don't think they're getting paid a whole lot less like it. There's an element of the value is still at the top and the capabilities is still in there. Again, it will shift and not everything I'm saying will be exactly how it goes through, but.

Kelly It's no different than the same argument I had before. Sure, you might be able to find ways to get the same cheaper. I would argue that's a really bad way to try and get what's really possible here, which is really improve your outcomes and, and keep up with everything as that water rises. Everyone's gotta keep swimming to a different degree and you gotta get better that, that goes through that.

Kelly I mean, it's just, I, I don't, I don't understand the inclination to believe that. The things that are [00:35:00] automatable are the things where that you're mostly paying for value exchange, like economies still work on value exchange, create value, pay for value, get value out. That's still the value is still the outcome in the business raising of when you do marketing.

Kelly I get more customers. I, my business, my ROI goes, all of the, all of that. It's not. Looking at this as a zero sum game of I am just paying someone to click buttons and magically run things on Google. And that just creates everything working as, as well as it can be. It's oversimplification of what we really do

Todd from your lips to God's ears as our former mentor used to say.

Todd okay, well, have a good spring break next week and, I'll look for another. Good topic to kick around and I'll talk to you then.

Kelly Thanks everyone.

Intro Thanks for listening to Contrary to Popular Opinion where we challenge you to think independently, push the limits, and take uncommon action so you can achieve game-changing results in your [00:36:00] business and your life.

Intro To stay up to date with our latest episodes, be sure to click the follow or subscribe button now. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.