Marketing is Getting Harder. But Paid Media is Getting EASIER?

0:00So marketing is getting harder, but paid media is getting easier. So this is a quote that I heard recently, and I thought it'd be interesting for us to talk about because I brought this up. I brought this up to people on my paid media team, and they didn't like that I said this quote. I actually disagree with it too. I know a lot of people are saying paid is getting easier, and they're saying paid is getting easier because of two things. AI helping them with campaigns. But the bigger one is because of the economy, a lot of people are cutting back on ad spend. So it's getting easier for them to produce ROI.

0:31But the main reason I disagree with this, with all the privacy changes, just look at Facebook. It was much easier to generate an ROI from Facebook ads when they had all that data until iOS blocked them, right? And then Google's going to end up doing the same thing as well. But paid used to be much easier when these platforms had so much data. I'm not saying it's a good thing that they had a data or a bad thing. I'm just saying it's a reality. And now, yes, there's a lot of tools out there that can make your campaigns a little bit more efficient. but that doesn't really matter. Your job from paid marketing is you spend a dollar and you need to make more.

1:04And it's harder to do that now than it was before. So here's what I'll say. I think there's a connecting point with these two statements. So again, the statement is marketing is getting harder, but paid media is getting easier. The X factor that connects these two comes down to creative at the end of the day. And so what this just means is as a paid media person in the past, you might've said, well, paid media doesn't need to understand creative or the creative strategy behind things. I would argue now that paid media people need to, they need to evolve a little more and they need to understand what actually drives people to take an action, right?

1:35Because the crutch of data is kind of going away. Well, it's like, okay, marketing is getting harder. Great. Well, what I can do to set myself apart from everyone else is I can figure out what actually hooks people in the very beginning. I can figure out how to do better storytelling, right? So I think if you're running an agency, for example, right now, then it's on you to figure out how you can teach your team these elements, how to be more creative, how to tell good stories with data, how to tell good stories overall in your ad creative. And that way you're going to perform better. So I do think PayMe is getting harder in that sense.

2:03Sure. There's a lot more automation coming, but that means the attention that you normally would spend on optimizations, because machines are going to do that better than you now, you got to take it over to other stuff that machines can't replace. Well, maybe machines will do it better for you because I think they're going to skew Just like we talked about in our LinkedIn podcast episode, your buddy asked someone who worked at LinkedIn and they're revealing things about the algorithm and they do stuff that helps them make more money. I believe the AI is going to skew to helping the companies make more money and not always doing what's best for the company.

2:35And if that was the case, the Google ad managers that work at Google would be amazing. But nine out of ten times when you work with the agency, not trying to just talk trash, it's more reality. people get better results doing with the agency or doing it in-house versus letting Google help them manage the campaigns. And it's because it's different incentives. Once focusing on their ROI, the Google ad employees, a lot of them are compensated on how much more money they can get people to spend, right? So it's just the motivations are, or the incentives are quite a bit different for both parties. With creatives, it's funny because a lot of people also talk about AI and how AI can help you create new creative campaigns.

3:12What AI sucks at is creating that amazing strategy. If you look at those Super Bowl commercials, those are examples of some of the best premium creative spots that you see in the world or the World Cup creatives. It's hard to do that kind of stuff through AI versus having a team really focused on doing something unique. Yeah. Look, you know what's interesting? A couple of years ago, I remember some of our people went up to the Google conference up in Mountain View. And their feeling was that Google would eventually try to cut agencies out, right? Because they want to take that revenue at some point, right?

3:43So I don't know how true that is. I think there's still very symbiotic relationship. They work very well with agencies. You know how much revenue agencies drive for Google? You know, in certain countries that are getting kickbacks from Google, right? Yeah. My point is like, I think it's more of a symbiotic relationship. I wouldn't be too afraid of that. But look, point is, paid media side, you got to step up, you got to evolve. It's how it's always been with any level of business and times are changing, right? Like if you think about search in general, the last, I don't know, like, yeah, got to be last 30 years or so when Excite search engine was out, Lycos, Alta Vista.

4:17If you go to Google, it's the same experience. You go to a search box and you type it. A lot of this stuff is changing now. This means SEO is changing, paid media is changing, right? Marketing is changing overall, but that's okay because if you're good at evolving, you are going to be the one that reached the rewards from all this. Dude, funny enough, when you said excite and or when you said 30 years old, I'm like, is search that old? So I just Googled excite founding date. Pretty much there. 1994. How crazy is that? Time flies. Yeah. Time flies. Anything else, Neil? Focus on creatives. It's something that a lot of people don't talk about.

4:50Eric and I still think paid ads is going to become harder and harder. Sure. In the short run, maybe people aren't bidding as much. So it's cheaper and it's easier for you to get an ROI, but in the long run, it'll continue to become more and more difficult to generate ROI. All right, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, five stars, it helps us grow and we'll see you tomorrow.