Martin Sorrell issues stark warning to media agencies
Former WPP global boss and S4 Capital owner Sir Martin Sorrell has warned media agencies they will be stripped of work by Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ AI ad systems.
At Madfest in London this week, Sorrell doubled down on a prediction he made two years ago that AI is coming for most of the world’s 250,000 media planning and buying jobs.
Sorrell speaking at Madfest (Unmade)
The Google and Meta platforms are designed for automated ad creation and execution of ad targeting for marketing campaigns. Sorrell said they are coming for big clients.
“What Mark [Zuckerberg] said was ‘we will produce content for that media planning, and buying at scale’, and a small or medium sized business will be able to create content and integrate the model into the media planning environment,” Sorrell said.
“Google have a thing called P Max – Performance Max – which is exactly the same. We do know roughly that 60 to 70% of Google’s ad revenues come from small and medium-sized enterprises. They will move up in my view to being more enterprise driven.”
He said the role of agencies will change. They will “increasingly be validators between clients” using these integration tools.
“The bad news for our industry is that for the 250,000 people who are employed, roughly, in media planning and buying. There won’t be 250,000 in two or three years time,” he said.
Read the full story on Unmade here.
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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If PMax and Meta performed without agencies, they wouldn’t need agencies… Let’s not put our trust into these black boxes
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