Eric Siu explains why paid media platforms like Meta and Google are becoming commoditized and what marketers should do instead. Focus on creative storytelling backed by data, hire strong analysts, and diversify beyond the big two into Amazon, Apple, Pinterest, and podcasts. Become a T-shaped marketer with depth in one area and breadth across channels.
So paid media is now becoming a commodity. A couple of years ago, most of the money from venture capitalists, about 50% of it was going towards Meta or Google. So the 2 big ad platforms. Now the game has changed quite a bit because old days you can basically turn on ads, let the algorithms work for you, and you'll get good results. The old days of easy mode when it came to marketing are now gone and marketing is becoming harder again. It's actually a good thing for people that are willing to put in the work, for people that are willing to be creative. If you're optimizing for ads, you can't compete against computers. A computer is going to beat you all day when there's a lot of data to work with. Would you just think about a calculator for a second? When you have a calculator, the calculator does math better than you, does better math than any human being out there, right? It's going to be the same thing with paid ads long term. And so the one thing that you can consider to kind of diversify is to think about your creative. If you have good creative, you're going to create more conversions and you are going to be able to do better long term because a good hook is going to cause more engagement with your ads and cause more people to pay attention. And then you're going to be able to get the results that you want to get. Now, number 2 is on the data side of things. Sure, everyone's collecting data, but how well are you able to tell a story with that data? That data is going to be used to guide where you should take your campaigns next, where you should double down on, where you should cut back, where you should keep going, what types of creatives work well. You need good data analysts. If you're a bigger company, you need good data scientists to help kind of put together that story. And then also diversifying your channels too. So it's not just Meta, it's not just Google. At the end of the day, you have Amazon's rising, Apple is rising as well, Pinterest is rising. It just depends on where your audience is hanging out, but also where they're the most engaged, right? And when you think about things from a retention standpoint, podcasts actually have the strongest retention that I've seen. I think if you want to become a really strong marketer, you have to think about how you can become a T-shaped marketer. So you might have gone really deep with paid media, but you can increase the width a little bit too. And you can learn social, you can learn email, you can learn SMS, you can learn all these other things where you're dangerous in all these other areas and you become indispensable to wherever you are working. If you just have one skill and you are not evolving, then what's going to happen is you're going to be left in the dust, right? And I think that's actually going to happen to a lot of paid media media people in the long term. Now, speaking of that, paid media is becoming commoditized. Well, what about AI? There's all this talk about AI that's going on, and this talk is kind of the prelude to that. But you got to check out this video over here to learn what is really going to happen to marketers next. So check out that video over there, and we'll see you in that one.
