I don’t know about your LinkedIn feed, but this week mine was dominated by quarterly results, mergers and layoffs. If you are hiring in marketing, now is a great time, as there is lots
of talent out there looking for a job!
The rumor mill is swirling around the predicted demise of DDB, which had not been confirmed as of this writing. Once one of the great stalwarts of epic
creative (VW, Avis and Budweiser’s “Wassup”), it is apparently going to be sacrificed in the Omnicom/IPG merger. Lots of online lamenting by “I used to work there” types.
Yet if there is one thing we all know, nothing is certain, apart from death and taxes.
All three agencies I once worked for (JWT, Leo Burnett, McCann-Erickson) do not exist anymore, although
their respective holding companies will claim they live on in new/merged entities.
WPP’s quarterly results were even more “sucky” than anticipated. Revenue for the
quarter was down 8.4% year-on-year, and the overall growth outlook is expected to decline 5.5% to 6%.
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Said Cindy Rose, CEO of WPP, after qualifying her first ever quarterly results as
“unacceptable”: “I personally believe there’s never been a better time to be in marketing. You could even say that AI will usher in the golden age of modern
marketing.”
That is called spin. The reality is that WPP is betting heavily on its shiny new AI agency service, OpenPro. CEO Rose: “OpenPro clients can choose to self-serve for
some aspects of the marketing workflow and then complement this with a range of managed services from WPP.” This means OpenPro is in direct competition with all brand-name agencies that are part
of WPP. Most analysts agree that there will be fewer brands inside the tent, and undoubtedly fewer people.
So it is great to be in marketing, provided you are an AI or a person managing them.
But even if you are tapping the keys at WPP’s OpenPro, you should really be working for one of the big tech platforms. Their relentless drive towards eliminating the need for agency services has
no end in sight.
This week, the multichannel platform (formerly known as Cable Provider) Spectrum Reach, in partnership with Waymark, announced it is expanding its AI-powered advertiser
offering, which has already supported more than 15,000 ad campaigns since launch in early 2023.
Pinterest announced its jump onto the AI bandwagon with user tools to fight AI slop, and the
launch of an AI powered assistant to help with shopping.
Still, all is not rosy and shiny in the new AI-powered marketing world. At eMarketer’s Future of Digital Summit last month,
Liquid Death’s chief media officer Benoit Vatere expressed concerns about paid social, noting that the lack of transparency associated with automation in advertising may offset its potential
efficiency gains. And 74.7% of marketers in a recent Taboola study reported diminishing paid social returns.
All this while Meta called time on its participation in the Media Rating
Council’s accreditation program. Fact-checking was abandoned earlier this year, leaving it to its own community to police fact from fiction. In fairness, it has hired IAS and DoubleVerify
to do some of the lifting. But in general, it seems more interested in creating more AI-generated or -curated content and advertising opportunities than anything else.