In this segment, Eric Siu discusses a recent claim that Meta has effectively eliminated the traditional media buyer role, shifting the focus of advertising to creative assets as the primary targeting mechanism. He explains that large SaaS ad budgets (e.g., $100K per month) now require hundreds of fresh creatives each month to satisfy algorithmic demands, rendering static ads and simple lookalike audiences insufficient. Siu argues that the industry response should be a new hiring paradigm: "4‑deployed" T‑shaped marketers who are deep specialists (SEO or paid media) but also competent across analytics, organic social, email, copywriting, and strategy. He predicts a broader trend away from narrow specialist positions toward well‑rounded generalist strategists who can navigate the evolving, creative‑centric ad ecosystem.
Chapters
I was looking at this tweet over here. So this guy, Matt Swielinski, he works for Victor now. He used to work at Growth. He used to do growth for Whisperflow and Superhuman. So he said, Meta quietly ended the media buyer job and most SaaS teams have not noticed. So creative is the targeting now. A $100K a month, K account per month spend needs 400 to 500 new creatives a month to feed the algorithm. 2 static ads and a lookalike audience is not a strategy. So we should talk about how we think about this because we're doing this for clients right now as well. But My opinion on this is that the really, whether you're in SEO or paid media, what we're hiring now, Neil, is what we call 4-deployed marketers. A 4-deployed marketer needs to be a T-shaped marketer that is deep in one area. So it could be SEO or it could be paid media, but then they're actually very broad across other categories. They do know how to do analytics, they know how to do organic social, they know how to at least talk about this stuff, right? And so you can't, I believe in today's age, in 2026, you can't just be a media buyer. Like, It's unfathomable to me, Neil, that people today, they're like, if you think back to when we were like 24, 25 years old, did we know how to do analytics? Like, yeah, we did. But now it's considered like a different job. And I do believe you should go deeper in it. But to be a well-rounded marketer, like I think I look at you, I look at me, it's like, sure, we might've started in SEO, but we know affiliate well, we know SEO, sorry, we know paid media well, we know all these things, we know email well, we know copywriting well. Yeah. And that's what I think it is. So this is not even the end of the media buyer job. I think this is the end of the, we're going to see less specialist marketing jobs and we're going to want more generalists that are just strong strategists at the end of the day.
