It's Over For Paid Media

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0:29Neil Patel:So I have this pulled up over here. So this guy, his name's Zach.

0:32Eric Siu:So the Madness AI situation is bigger than anyone realizes. This is what he's saying, not what Neil and I are saying. Millions of media buyers are about to get left behind or even fired. Meta just paid over$2 billion for a Singapore-based AI company that launched in March 2025, making it one of their largest acquisitions ever right behind WhatsApp. And if you think this is just chat GPT with extra features, you're completely missing what's actually happening. There are two types of people right now. So I'll just give the two types of people. People who think AI is a tool that you use when you need help, asking questions and copying answers into your work, and people who understand AI as an autonomous worker that executes entire workflows while they're literally asleep.

1:06Eric Siu:So let me explain. So Manus now, so Manus is a general agent that Meta bought. Manus can now log into ad platforms, analyze campaign performance, make optimization changes, and handle customer support by monitoring, inboxes, and responding, all without human intervention. And I think this is where we can talk about our reaction.

1:24Neil Patel:Yeah, no. So here's the big thing with Facebook and Google managing your ads. And this person, just to be very clear here, they're talking about Facebook managing your ads and they're talking about in the Facebook portal because of the acquisition that they made. Facebook and Google, they've had AI technology for a long time when it comes to ads and they've been trying to improve it. Mark Zuckerberg for a long time saying, why do agencies even need to exist? You have to keep in mind that what they optimize for is not always what you're optimizing for. They're optimizing, yes, for you to get great results, but they're also optimizing to maximize their own company's revenue.

2:14Neil Patel:And sometimes those two things fight each other because what's best for Facebook may not be best for you. Just like what's best for Google may not be best for you. Such as if you throw a ton of ads in Gmail, you'll see it doesn't convert that well and you can burn a lot of money really quickly. I'm not saying you can't make Gmail ads profitable. I'm just saying if you let the AI run wild, a lot of times you'll burn a ton of money in Gmail ads and other channels that aren't the best versus someone typing a keyword into Google, clicking on a paid ad and just buying. So the way I look at it is you still need humans in the loop.

2:50Neil Patel:For a long time, there have been tools that help automate and make media buying easier. You can call it, oh, we have AI now, so it's much more sophisticated. They've been using machine learning and a lot of cool tech to make it easier to buy ads, and they have. But the real secret to doing really well from buying ads is not actually how you buy ads. Yes, I said before, you need some humans in the loop. But what it really comes down to is a creative component. Yes, AI can help you with some creative ideas. But the real secret is doing something unique and trying new stuff that no one's tried before.

3:33Neil Patel:And it's a big hit or miss. It's a big experimentation game. AI can help you run the experiments faster. but once you find the creative pitch that converts really well that's not been tried before in your space you double down and you just go really hard at it but you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the right one that just works well yeah so my reaction to this in regards to if paid media

3:57Eric Siu: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 gonna have to become a different um 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 uh you know engineers at the same time so a lot of roles are going to start to converge um and so um you know taylor holiday actually posted this to to to x i'm talking about you know head of growth media buyer creative strategist retention strategist becomes profit engineer right whatever that means um so my whole point is i think if you evolve like yes pay being is still important yes you still need a human to loop you can't let these things fully automate but again you know and we haven't reacted to this yet but when you look at block cutting 40 percent of staff that's a lot of people right um you don't just cut 40 and there's probably some uh 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 um but i digress my point is i think um i'm and neil curious to get your thoughts.

5:01Eric Siu:I think if you're just like, if we did five to 10 years ago, if you're just a button pusher paid media, you're actually, you know, 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? Because it's only going to get better over time.

5:29Eric Siu:Or if I'm an SEO, I'm going to try to really learn the AEO side of things. Like how do we learn Reddit as well? How do we learn YouTube as well? I can't just be a one trick pony, right? So I think one trick ponies are going to get shot. I think the ones that adapt, the roles that converge, those people are going to not only get paid more, but they're going to be in more demand.

5:47Neil Patel:Yeah. And by the way, the media buyers that just push buttons and weren't doing anything amazing, I think a lot of them weren't doing well from a job perspective for many years now. I don't even think a lot of that's related to AI. I think for a while now, a lot of these roles, when people are just clicking a few buttons, they've been losing contracts at their agencies or they've been eventually getting replaced because people are like, you're not adding much value. Because technology has made a lot of this stuff easier for years. I don't think anything's really changing. It's just accelerating.

6:19Neil Patel:It's the same stuff just getting accelerated because technology is getting better. And when companies are laying off a lot of people, like Block laying off 4 ,000, and I spoke at their, I have 40%, I think it was 4 ,000 though.

6:31Eric Siu:I spoke at their internal marketing

6:32Neil Patel:conference. I can't go in to discuss what I spoke about because I signed a contract. But when you think about AI and block, am I going to say that AI is not causing any jobs to replace? No. Am I going to say that AI is a reason for 4 ,000 jobs to be fully replaced? No. I bet you there was a ton of wastage in there. If you just look at X, okay, a company that Jack Dorsey created or Twitter and Elon ended up buying it, he canned a lot of people and they've seen growth in usage with a much smaller team. This was pre all this AI stuff. A lot of these large corporations have been bloated for a long, long time and they need a cut and many of them need a cut even more.

7:17Eric Siu:Yeah. So let me give you the numbers around this deal. So you like numbers, right? So Block was$24 billion in revenue and 24 % gross profit growth. Okay. Just cut 4 ,000 people while raising 2026 guidance to$12.2 billion in gross profit. Stock ripped 20 % after hours. The market added roughly$6 billion market cap. So that's$1.5 million in enterprise value created per eliminated roll. Now, maybe that's not the right way to look at it. But I would say that there's a handful of things. I think one, I think the way Jack Dorsey handled it, if you look at his message, was handled really well. Like you do 20 weeks of severance plus for every, I think it's an extra week for every year of tenure.

7:53Eric Siu:Plus like you get to keep your equipment. There's like insurance and all that. So he's, he's, and he's saying, look, the reality is like something has come and artificial intelligence. Sure. You can use that narrative. I think part of it is, is to AI. But I think the other part is you look at 2020, 2021, I think people just overhired. Right. And so I think part of that is still kind of undoing that.

8:12Neil Patel:Totally agree. I think the biggest issue is people overhired. Like a lot of these companies don't need that many employees. and I look at some of these companies that are publicly traded in the SaaS space, they're barely growing and it's just like, you haven't really released too many new features and product updates, yet you have 500 people working on product and engineering and I'm like, I would fire a lot of those people if you haven't really made any major product changes in the last 12 months. Like, why do you need 500 people on a team? Forget AI, 500 people are just really inefficient. There's too much bureaucracy.

8:48Neil Patel:get rid of a lot of them, you can probably get more done with like 50 people.

8:52Eric Siu:Yep. And the bureaucracy is actually something we can talk about, Neil, because I've been just sitting in that office yesterday. I can just tell that, you know, people are really inundated by the bureaucracy. And so, you know, what's interesting, I kind of got called out because one of the people that was a VP at that company used to used to work at my company, right? And, you know, for example, Neil, let me just ask you, when you have your metrics pulled up, okay, when a metric is, you know, you look at traffic lights, red, yellow, green, red means like it's really bad. Yellow means it's kind of, you know, it's not doing well.

9:20Eric Siu:Green means it's moving in the right direction. You're going to focus on the red and yellow things, right? So let me ask you, Neil, Neil Patel's way of looking at this. If something's red or yellow, when do you address it? Do you wait a week, two weeks, three weeks for you to ask for a remedy? Like what is, what is your stance on it?

9:35Neil Patel:Well, before I see the report, I hope they already told me what they're going to do to fix the reds and the yellows. So there's not really a waiting. It's more so my team when there's problems. They don't come to me with the problems. They come to me with potential solutions. Some solutions I love. Some solutions I don't like. Some solutions are whatever. So then the solutions that I don't like, we'll brainstorm and try to come up with better ones. The solutions that are whatever, again, we'll do a similar process there. And it's not always me with the best ideas. There's a lot of other people who have better ideas than me.

10:09Neil Patel:It's just more so as a collective group, we try to be proactive about solving problems. I think just looking at things like red, yellow, green. And if someone doesn't want to come to solutions and they just want to complain about the reds, then it's like, all right, this is just wasting everyone's time.

10:24Eric Siu:And what if they're like, Neil, I've tried coming up with the solutions, but I kind of want to hear from you what solutions you have in mind. So I've tried it a couple of times already. It's not working. Neil, you know, please, what are your ideas?

10:36Neil Patel:So I would say, what were your solutions that you came up with? You must have came up with at least once. you could have at least typed it into chat gpt and ask them to help you come up with the solution even if it's a terrible one i just want to hear what you were thinking and if you don't have a actual solution what direction were you thinking and like you know um you know uh what made you get stuck right and in all reality i'm kind of being nice but i would just want to straight up know why didn't they come up with any solutions and why didn't they even try to ask ai or a friend or a colleague and I would just be pissed.

11:09Eric Siu:Yeah. So at this company, look, so yes, yes, totally agree with you. I think my flaw calling out in public is, you know, we do the traffic lights, which I actually got from the great book, The Great CEO Within. The problem is, I think one of the things that's flawed with that book is saying, hey, when something is red or yellow, you should wait two or three weeks, right? And so I followed that for a little bit. Two or three weeks? That's what they tell you in that book? Which is actually two to four percent of the year, right? Which is crazy, right? So I was doing that before and then one of the guys called me out.

11:39Eric Siu:He's like, yeah, when you did that, that was really stupid, right? I was like, yes, it was absolutely stupid. But I think the key thing for everyone listening to this is that if something's red or yellow, I think you've got to keep applying pressure or you're going to feel it, right? And hopefully, yes, if you're going to your boss, for example, come with actually three solutions, pick the best one, right? And then go back and forth to prove that you're proactive with it. But waiting it out and being okay with it and letting the scorecard be red or yellow, that is a nice way to stunt the growth of your company.

12:07Yeah.

12:08Neil Patel:The one thing I love about hiring is if you look for personality traits of people who are like obsessive, they pay attention to details, they stress out a lot, and they worry about things. Those people usually don't wait for the red lights. when they see something that's yellow, they try to fix it right away or figure out a solution. They stress, keeps them up at night. Yes, you want them to have a work-life balance and all that kind of good stuff and not have issues with their family. But those people naturally just perform well from what I've seen, assuming you're hiring people with experience as well.

12:49Neil Patel:And then with those people, you don't have to push them to solve the reds or the yellows in marketing or business. More so, you got to force them to unplug a little bit and go spend time with their kids or their significant other.

13:02Eric Siu:Dude, so Neil, you might not know the answer to this. So if you don't, I'll go ahead and fill in for you and I'll tell you what we do. But what do you guys do to kind of figure out if they have that, maybe obsessive is not the right word, but like, you know, they can't help. Yeah, obsessive personality. So what are you guys doing to filter for that during the hiring process?

13:19Neil Patel:It's just interviewing. So when we're interviewing, will ask specific tasks. Okay. So let's say if I'm interviewing for a product role and I give someone a design, all right? And I would be like, how would you make this flow better? I would look to see where they designed some elements. Did they match the style guide? Did they ask me for the style guide even if I didn't provide it? Because I'll tell them, here's what we're looking for. Let me know if you need anything from me. so we'll start looking for people if they use the right color of orange or if they you know use our right fonts and all this kind of stuff and if people don't pay attention to those little details and obsess about them then we usually know that they're not the right fit and that's an easy example for product because it's more black and white um you know with non-black and white roles sometimes in management roles, you'd go ask them very specific details.

14:18Neil Patel:Like, hey, client was upset. X, Y, and Z happened. You gave it to employee, didn't get resolved. What do you do? And I would have them break down not just scenarios like that, but I would have them give examples in the past of working with the team where things didn't go their way and what they did.

14:38Eric Siu:Yep. So what Neil's talking about, and then we screen for this, it's looking for that bias to action, right? And the very first question I actually ask, and this is part of it, it's not everything, but the very first question when they get to me during the interview is like, how did you prepare for this call, right? And I'll tell you what, the beat Claude guy, the AI guy, he's like, oh, I read your book. I was like, oh, you read my book. I was like, not many people do that, right? Like you read my book to prepare for the interview. Like that's cool, right? But that's a bias to action right there.

15:04Eric Siu:And not everyone has the same demeanor around it, but that goes back to our core values, right? So ours is bias to action. We want relentless learners. You know, we want people who make bold long-term bets, unreasonably resilient. But one thing I did find out, Neil, so you've seen the show Billions, right? Yeah. Okay, Wendy Rhodes. So do you want to describe what Wendy Rhodes did for a living?

15:23Neil Patel:Sure. So Billions is a TV show about a hedge fund manager named Axe. And Wendy Rhodes, she was their in-house psychiatrist or shrink or something like that. And she would help people mentally get in the game so they can be a top performer. So let's say you have someone, and I'm going to give you guys a marketing example that's all relatable. You have someone who is doing affiliate marketing for you internally. They're figuring out how to arbitrage ads and make more money for other businesses and you're collecting affiliate revenue from it. Or they're figuring out how to get you press on a lot of sites and adding in affiliate links and then convincing them like, hey, add in affiliate link, you can make more money and push our products and adjust the text instead of just mentioning our name, which in many cases doesn't do anything because there's very little context there.

16:18Neil Patel:And sometimes they're just off on their game and they have some personal issues that's slowing them down on work because it happens to a lot of us. And Wendy Rhodes, in this example, the shrinker psychiatrist, she would figure out what's blocking them, whether it's personal or work-wise, help them resolve it so that way they can go back to performing well. Yep.

16:37Eric Siu:So that was a very good explanation. I didn't expect you to go into that much detail, especially with it being, you know, 10, 18 p.m. for Neil. So here's the thing. The reason why I just asked why I'm talking about Wendy Rhodes right now is because I actually posted something to Twitter just saying how, you know, whatever you're using, like an open claw where it has memory, when you work with it over time, you actually can have it do a complete personality test diagnosis of you. Okay. So I had to do a diagnosis of everything. Um, but the one D so there's someone kind of known as Wendy Rhodes. Like she's like the Wendy Rhodes type on, on Twitter.

17:10Eric Siu:She responded and she's like, Hey, all the personality tests you mentioned, like they're fine. Right. But you should use this one. So you should try this out too. It's called the MMPI. So whatever, you know, LLM you're using the most, just say, Hey, you work with me a lot. Score me on the MMPI. It's actually a 576 question personality test. Um, and I asked it to, to kind of call out patterns, right? And the reason I'm giving this to everyone is like, I think you should do this with whatever whatever LLM you're using. So look for the MMPI. But what I'm going to test doing now, Neil, is whoever we're talking to during the call, I'm going to say, hey, pull out whatever you're using, chat GPT, whatever, ask it about your MMPI, whatever you're working with, and then tell me what it says.

17:46Eric Siu:And that's actually where it can show your neuroticism and all those things. Go ahead, Neil.