Eric Siu argues that traditional paid-media roles focused on campaign management are disappearing to automation and layoffs. He points to companies like Block cutting staff and cites Satya Nadella and Taylor Holiday on how marketing, product, design, and engineering are converging. To stay relevant, paid-media professionals need to learn AI-driven creative production and how to create creatives at scale.
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In regards to if paid media is over or is it over for paid media marketers, I think the paid media marketers who don't adapt, right? So just the button pushers alone are going to be in big trouble. That's my opinion. And I think if you're a paid media person, you're going to have to become a different— I think a lot of roles in marketing are converging now, right? And so Satya Nadella from Microsoft actually said that, look, if you're on the product side, you're actually kind of converging with designers, you're converging with engineers at the same time. So a lot of roles are going to start to converge. And so Taylor Holiday actually posted this to X, talk about, you know, head of growth, media buyer, creative strategist, retention strategist becomes profit engineer, right? Whatever that means. So my whole point is, I think if you evolve, like, yes, paid media is still important. Yes, you still need a human in the loop. You can't let these things fully automate. But when you look at Block cutting 40% of staff, that's a lot of people, right? You don't just cut 40% and you don't get it right too. With 40, when you cut 40%, there's probably some really amazing people that you probably shouldn't have cut, right? But I digress. My point is, I think like if we did 5 to 10 years ago, if you're just a button pusher paid media, you're actually pretty valuable. A lot of agencies needed to hire you, right? I don't think that's going to be the case anymore because That actually means if you're just a button pusher today, you actually haven't evolved. I think if I was working in paid media completely today, fully immersed, I would try to learn as much as possible. Hey, how can I start to learn the AI creative piece? How can I learn to start to make creatives? And how can I learn to make creatives at scale?
