AI isn't Helping How Your Media is Managed

Source: YouTube auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned (repeated caption lines removed, misheard brand names corrected).

0:03Welcome to AI Ads and Beyond. I'm Lisa Rassler. This is a podcast for experienced marketers where we explore how artificial intelligence is changing paid media strategy and performance. Today, we're talking about AI skills, expertise, and how that's changing with AI. And we have with us John Williams, who is a senior paid manager of paid media at Seer Interactive, and he brings deep PPC expertise and a strong perspective on the skills gap about how AI's changing the way we see our jobs.

So, John, welcome. I'm excited to be here and talk about that gap. I think it's a big one we all feel like I'm really excited about this. Before we dive in, tell us a little bit about your background in PPC. You know, how did you get into all this? Uh, dumb luck. Yeah, it was really it was dumb luck. I was a banker and just really into data. And I decided to go on a sabbatical.

During that time, I wanted to figure out like life. You know, I'm like this 27, 28-year-old primed kid. Like, what am I going to do with my life? And so, I applied for a sales job for the Yellow Pages. And the hiring manager and the GM were both there. And the GM said, "You're talking a lot about this thing called the internet." I was like, "I think, you know, the phone book is going to move to the internet. And you know a lot about the internet. Sell me the internet. I don't know a lot about it." And I sold him the internet. And he was like, "Can you still sell the phone book? Here's the phone book. This is a one-by-one, and this is a a double truck."

And that was that was the beginning of my journey into the world of SEM and just digging deep into what is my background in marketing. So, yeah, that's how I got started and I've it's it's been a wonderful journey. Now, you have a lot of strong opinions about PPC expertise and what that looks like. So, how how would you describe the state of PPC skills right now in the industry? On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say probably a two.

And the reason why is that we are as leaders in the industry, yourself included, I don't know that me and you and the rest of us out there are doing a really great job at teaching people up, uh coaching people up. And so, that's why I give it a two. And there's a lot of people coming in just using YouTube videos and these master classes. I mean, you have people who've been doing advertising for 3 years and have a LinkedIn voice of a small circle that are now teaching master classes.

Makes no sense to me at all. And so so, generally overall, you feel like the the newest generation of specialists in PPC are just are not getting enough coaching and training. No, they're not. I I don't know that they're learning the strategic pieces behind even what they're looking at. Like, why am I building an ad? What is the impact of the ad, right? And then, how does that influence the business and it's always been a challenge to talk about business metrics. It's always been like a a a quiet, closed-door thing that's been often overlooked for oh, 2,000 ROAS or, you know, my CPAs are single digits.

3:40Great. What is the action you're actually talking about and how does the action actually drive the revenue for the business and how does that impact margin? Those things that we grew up on, that were challenges for us, today you can't even talk about that. I remember trying to diagnose a headline just to find out the value of a headline for a business. Why should CMOs and the managers care about this if their skills are going to be more focused around AI, especially?

I think in the bigger the bigger the company, it becomes more about data and what you're looking at and less about tactic. And so, if you're asking a tool to do something for you, which, you know, we kind of grew up with a couple of tools, right? Maybe the optimizers of the world, the WordStreams of the world, the SpyFus of the world, but we didn't lean on them to do our job. Uh we use it as a reference, right? So, when our directors, at the time when we were just strategist, our directors and our managers were like, "Do you have a reference? Do you have a citation? Do you have Are you working with the analytics team to support it?" I think because of AI, the CMO should be worried that somebody that's coming in that doesn't even know that you need, you know, 90 characters or that your 90

characters could be expanded or extended if it's a brand, that they're relying on AI to tell them to to what to look for. I think it should be concerning because the CMO themselves are are are using the tool, and if if the person is junior to them is using it, but doesn't have the knowledge of the CMO, then where do you go? How do you improve the business, right? CMO can't possibly do the work of the strategist, but strategist doesn't have knowledge of the CMO. So, that's the problem.

Do you think What do you think is causing the skills gap then? Do you think AI is causing it or exposing it? There's such a big gap in what is artificial intelligence and the use of artificial intelligence. There's a big gap there. There was a rat race to get to the top to show that like, yeah, hey, I can put together a thousand connectors and zaps and widgets. And then everything fell on its head because they were like, well, I can't possibly afford a thousand zaps just to diagnose an ad, right? So, that fell on its head really quick.

6:13That's a different problem than the problem we have in advertising where you have agency stepping on agency for a plumber or a lawyer that's a small business and they're saying, well, I got the best technical capability. Well, how are you do you have the best technical capability with a hundred clients and your junior strategist junior strategist fresh out of college and they're pulling levers in Google Ads doing what? Exactly. So, that to me is a gap because we've skipped the six-month to the year journeyman model that used to exist. It used to take six months to a year before you could build a campaign, right? The testing and validation used to mean something. The certificates used to be like, oh yeah, I got a certificate. I am certified. That used to have today, it doesn't exist because the trade itself is lost. Why are you using the bid model

you're using? I'm just jumping in using TCPA, but why? Why didn't you start with manual bidding? The account is $500 a month. Did you even get tracking down, right? Well, what's tracking? Did you know to check like, hey, your form was completed. Like those little things are huge huge differences. In fact, today some somebody out of the UK had a had a challenge. He's a locksmith and he's like, I had this agency set up all of this fancy stuff and my account tanked and I was like well just I don't even need access to your account. Just take a screenshot of your website and let me look at it.

And I was like do you do you see this going through? I don't need to log into Google Ads to tell you and to look at what is going on. That gap that we learned how to diagnose and what to look at, that doesn't exist in our world. So that that is on us and then AI is a whole another thing. How can you use AI and ask the right questions? Not tell it but ask it the right questions to get the meaningful result or product that you're looking for.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think you need to have the knowledge to be able to narrow it down when you ask question about what sort of bidding strategy you should use instead of it being an open question. You know, someone with more experience will be able to say I'm looking at a couple of different different approaches and here's why to get more feedback from the from the chatbot. So I hear you talking about a couple different things. One of them was you mentioned the certificates which is kind of this like an official way of learning, taking courses and classes which I think people should and as annoying as some of those certificates are because they only teach you from the platforms perspective they are helpful for you to understand what the platform expects from you.

9:12Yeah. The other thing you talked about was like the journeyman or like the internship or apprenticeship and you have talked to about this as more of a skilled trade. So if you could find a solution for this, what would it look like to kind of bring it back to that? You almost have to eliminate the mass of agencies. You almost have to get back to like the core the core group to be like a dream to want to work for like Cara and Havas. It used to mean something, right? It used to mean something to want to be part of Google and Microsoft. It did. It was a badge of honor to be part of Hannapin. And so, I I think you have to get back to consolidation in our industry where somebody has to say, "You know what?

I've had enough. I I can't possibly continue to think about revenue for myself. I have to think about revenue for the for the businesses we get to serve. And I I think that's the answer. Are people going to give up their paychecks that give them the life and and and and be unselfish? That's a big ask, but that's the that's the answer. There's going to be turnover, and you're going to run into accounts that are a mess. It's just going to continue to get worse, or we're going to see automation really take over. I think that's why we're seeing the platforms lean in so fast, especially Meta. They're like, "We got to stop the bleeding." And people were leaving Meta, not advertising there, cuz it was just so bad with management. I mean, I think Google is finally recognizing that and stepping in and saying like, "Look, there's only really

only so much you can influence." Right? You can either have a budget, you can have a bid, and you can have the right message, and we'll just handle the rest. So, yeah. Right. So, what do you mean about What do you mean bad with management? Can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah, I mean, what are you actually managing today? You're not doing a whole lot, you know, with respect to ads account. You can't make change You shouldn't make changes daily. Like, what are you going to change daily?

In an account. I set up an account today. I had five campaigns. My budget is $5,000 and I'm a SaaS product and my average cost per lead for forget even the win is 500 bucks. I'm already overextended in the number of campaigns. The math doesn't add up. Right? So, if I'm already overextended in it, what possible levers could I pull if I'm already overextended in my campaigns? I'm going to keep adding new keywords.

12:03What kind of ads am I going to add? And this is just Google. We're not talking about LinkedIn. We're not talking about Facebook. We're not talking about the Reddits and the Quoras, right? Um we're just talking about Google. Oh, there's Microsoft. And now Amazon does B2B lead gen. So like yeah, I I I think we run into do we really understand the business and we're we're doing just a little bit too much.

We're overextending ourselves and I I I think it's unnecessary because there's only so much you can do. You're saying going into too many platforms at the same time? doing doing too much. Like, if you have $5,000 your average CPA is 500 how many leads do you need for the system to actually be able to even optimize? Well, you need 30. So, if you need 30 leads at minimum times 500 that math is what?

15. If you're not even at 15, that means how many months do you need to advertise in that single platform to get there? That means you need 3 months. Can a junior person do that? No. Why aren't we thinking like that? Why aren't we talking to our businesses like that? Those are all the things that like we're just overextended that we really need to to get better at. Yeah. I think that's really interesting because I see that a lot where there's a knowledge gap in understanding how things will run.

You know, how much budget you need, how much to divide it up. And I think that is something that comes with experience, no matter how much automation is behind it. The automation actually makes it a little bit more difficult because you do have less less levers that you can pull. I mean, there's not a whole lot, right? And so if if you're already not doing the math the $15,000 needed to get to the volume that you need, you're just in the system changing keywords. And then every time you change a keyword, it resets the learning period. And then every time you turn off an ad, it resets the learning period. Every time you change a bid, it resets the learning period.

Right. not doing And so it's like the only thing you can really do for an account like that is give it time and make incremental adjustments, right? Like work on the landing page. Stay away from the ads account. Work on the pre-click journey and understanding that. Work on understanding the business and the environment that that business is circling in. Those are the things that we used to have to focus on as junior strategists.

Hey, tell me about the business. Do the research so that the AM or the senior strat could go in and say "Okay, this makes sense. Let's have a conversation with the business owner before we pull a lever." Like we we're not doing all the things we should be doing. We're doing too much in the platforms themselves. I think doing the management in the platform is only a small piece of it. As you mentioned, there we have the pre-click, the post-click, understanding the business, the business environment the economy, and then competitors. And a lot of those other outside factors will impact the ads campaigns in ways that require us to respond, hopefully not react, but you know, to be out ahead of it.

15:27Yes. Uh yeah, all of that. Yeah, all the all of those are the things that I mean, how do you have a junior person understand that? Keep them out of the ads account and make them become researchers and learners again. Like, it's a it's a That's what a trade is. A trade isn't Hey, you need to go as a If we use plumber, or you become a pilot, you like, to become a pilot, you need 10,000 hours.

To become a a certified plumber, you need 10,000 hours, right? And anything that you do, to be in the NBA, you need to put probably 10,000 shots up over the course of your life to even make it to the next level of some sort. Soccer, football, anything, right? To become an expert or good enough, right? And you have younger our younger generation of advertisers, marketers, just thrown into the fire. Here's five accounts and you're going to learn from a wiki, you know, how to do advertising. It's not fair to them, it's not fair to the businesses we serve.

Going back to you talking about the master classes and the training programs, all of them focus on the button pushing. They don't talk a lot about the things that we just brought up, like the customer's journey, the business environment, all of that research, which is super critical and really does make or break a campaign if you can get ahead on those things. That's really important, so I love that, like, putting in the number of hours and maybe doing everything that touches it except for pushing the buttons.

We spent so much time trying to understand the business and just learning how to build an ad, that we craved script. We used to crave a script to automate it so we could spend more time like understanding the business, less pulling the levers. And now it's the opposite. We have people spending more time teaching somebody how to like change a bid as opposed to somebody spending more time trying to say, "Take your time, go learn the business." And I I just I think that that's a big opportunity. And and yeah, it's a big opportunity for our industry.

Do you remember people would go to conferences and they would hang on every word of the Google people so that they could learn how something worked. Right? How the ads were served and the minute details of everything and how you know, how to increase the quality scores, those quality score chasers. I mean, how exhausting that is. So, I mean, that's definitely not something we see as much anymore. They're um I don't I mean, they're we're not looking for that and craving that information as much as we were cuz that would have been like our top thing.

18:23Like, we're going to get some inside secrets. I really love like Monacom's social style and shopping style theory. Today even still holds true for Performance Max, right? Do you know what it took to even get to that theory? Do you know how much practice and strategy to get to that? Can you remind me Like the whole the whole idea was that you for Performance Max is that you just push everything in from ads and creative and text and then you're going to hit every every part of the funnel with no control.

But Monacom's thought was like, "Why wouldn't we just build an audience or theme around the creative?" Why wouldn't we then build an audience and theme around the text for search ads? And then why wouldn't we just exclude all that stuff so we can serve shopping ads and better control all of our shopping ads, right? So now you can get all the benefits of Performance Max using the feed and their ability to expand. And then for the social style, you could take advantage of YouTube and the display part of what Performance Max has to offer, and you can learn something about the creative, right? So that was the whole idea, the whole theory behind it.

John, besides your interest in the PPC skillset and the in AI, and so you've been working on AI agents. I've seen you writing about that and and working on some, let's see, AI agents in open source. For those not familiar with that, can you tell us about what it is you're doing, what that is, and why it's important? Because I immediately want to get into like the weeds of it, the the the why.

The industry is craving a solution that is the fast food for paid search, but I want the healthy version of fast food. I want a solution that allows somebody that is a business owner to say, you know, this agency isn't helpful. I got a tool that I can just go to that's going to give me strategy that is going to talk to me and is going to know my business and is going to take care of what I need to manage my advertising, and it's going to cost me $9.99 or $10.99, and then I only need to pay that whenever I want to use the agent. Otherwise, I don't have to pay it. And I think our industry is is craving that because we're not we're not doing a great job at selling strategy. We're not doing a great job at managing those relationships. And I just

21:19think our industry is craving it. And so, that's the root of my work, the work that I've I've been working on for the past 2 and 1/2 years is trying to understand not the LLM itself, um but trying to understand the neural part of it, the brain, the question-asking part of it, so that we can have meaningful conversations because that to me is why somebody even does advertising with anybody in the first place is that you're having a meaningful conversation with a meaningful relationship.

What So, the AI agent is providing strategy. It's working at a higher level. Is that what I just applied for a standard access in Google Ads. I've answered all of their questions to get released officially into their API. A- and I have submitted my project to the cloud team for approval. They gave me approval for Gemini use. So, they let me connect to Google Gemini developer. It's the only tool I, you know, that exist as a agentic resource for managing advertising.

That's not promoting me. It's just saying like even Google recognizes like, "Hey, our tool, our advisor, is good, but like, hey, this is I think we're missing the strategic give it to me, understand my business perspective." And so, that's my focus with the agents, not tools, not task, not connectors, but an actual thoughtful, thinking, what I want to say a for to manage to manage your media. That's what I'm working on.

Okay, and so this is your vision is that this is the strategist. That seems like that's only one part of the solution. How is it applied to the platforms or to Google Ads? It's giving the power back to the business owner. The business owner has given us so much. They've allowed us to feed their families, allowed us to do so much, and they're so busy. But they're experts. We And so the business owner is the front line. And so if the business owner has a tool that's a thoughtful, considerate resource for them to pull levers in the platform, which is, "Hey, I just need you to build a campaign with these keywords based off of this insight that I have." And then I want you to go extrapolate that at 100x beyond the knowledge that I carry, then this resource can inject that into Google Ads

24:01today. It can do that, right? And that that is the purpose of the the learning models themselves is to be able to give everybody an instant resource of information, not so much be a tactician. The agent itself can be the tactician. In this case, it would be the strategist, right? But yeah, so my hope is that that the business owners, the small business owners, um start to leverage these type of of resources so that they're not getting or having bad experiences. We no longer have to worry about pulling levers. We can be coaches. We can be consultants. We can be teachers and educators again on how to achieve a goal or or reach your objective.

Well, I'm glad you told me that because that was going to be my next question. I would say that that job is to continue to elevate as an educator, as a coach. I think the ultimate thing in what we do is not pulling levers and going into ads account and building ads or adding keywords and changing bids, is being a coach. To me, there've only been a few that are coaches, right? My CEO today, he can get in front of anybody in a lecture hall, he can get in front of a CMO or CEO, and he can bring them along for the ride.

You can compare that to the Billy Donovans of the world, basketball coaches, you can connect it to the Joe Paterno, you know, football coaches, and then you have the Jeff Allens of the world who understand broadly everything about marketing and media, but man, can he take a business and he can bring the business strategy together at a level that he doesn't need to know how to build an ad, but he can bring it together. Those are coaches.

Right now, we have a lot of tempting to be managers. We need more coaches. And so, hopefully this strategist allows fills that gap. And then the managers that should be coaches, they get to develop into that. Yeah, that would be my hope. Right. So, coaching, leadership, inspiration. Is that your Yeah, look at what you do, right? Like, in your success with the businesses that you have and what inspires people. Right? How are your conversations going?

I would like to see that more, too, because we are definitely lacking. That's like leadership, inspiration, you know, direction, the bigger picture, for sure, definitely. And so, like, my final question, what based on our conversation or or, you know, your your life, our lives, what what are the top three things you think PPC professionals should do now to stay relevant? Are we speaking from a business perspective or are you speaking from somebody that just wants to get in?

27:04Yeah, there I mean there really are multiple ways you could you could you could position those three things. So, is it somebody that's in or wants to continue to stay in or relevant as in they own their own business, they have their own idea? We're talking about the skills gap. How do I stay relevant in the industry so that I can be gainfully employed moving forward? I go to sleep with my laptop in my face for AI.

So, like I'm off at 5:00, I have family time until 8:30, my son goes to bed, and then I'm on my laptop or one of my computers until probably 1:00 in the morning practicing my trade. That's number one. Like if you want to be somebody that's good, do it. Just do it. If you want to be something that's great and relevant moving forward that's helpful, it's the extra time that nobody's talking about. You're putting in that time behind the scenes. Number two, you're networking. You're reaching out, you're asking questions in people's DMs.

And it's nonetheless you let your guard down to ask for somebody to say, "Hey, I don't know this. Can you help me with this?" And you're not billing somebody for that time. You're just doing it because one, you're practicing and you're learning something new, but you're also helping people and that that's going to pay it forward. You're putting yourself out there. You're testing everything that you've now learned from one, the practice you've put in yourself, for the help you're giving to other people. Now, regardless of the likes, because we're in a like world, regardless of the comment world, because we're in a comment world, you're on every platform yourself. I mean every platform.

You need to be on every platform. Somebody's like, "John, I don't know Quora." Okay, great. Here's what Quora does. And this is why you should be on Quora and how it aligns with your vertical. I'm just learning Reddit. Okay, great. Well, this is why you should do Reddit and Pinterest and Amazon. This is why you should know the marketplaces at Walmart and Target. All of that extra time allows you to then put in that practice. Practice what you preach, right? And you don't have to be famous.

You don't have to be on the stages across the United States of America. You don't have to be doing master classes to teach, to give, and to and to share. You don't have to do it. So, those are the three things that I would say. So, to summarize, you're saying number one, practicing your trade, practice training and learning in your trade, and number two, networking and collaboration, Yep. and number three, visibility and sharing, sharing your knowledge.

If someone wants to get a hold of you or follow your work, where would you recommend they find you? Just go to LinkedIn, John Michael Williams. You can get me on Instagram, Facebook, or or Twitter, or again, one of those channels. So, just John Williams at Cierant Interactive will get you to me, and I have an open calendar, so you ever want to chat, I'll make 30 minutes. I'll always give you 30 minutes at minimum. And then if it really is something critical, I'll give you my cell phone number. The worst thing I can do is share my time to help you grow.

30:30Find me if you want me. I'm here. Thanks, everyone, for being with us today on AI Ads and Beyond. If you are listening from your favorite podcast app, why don't you follow us so you can listen to some episodes in the future. And I thank you again for joining us.