Media buying is a window, not a career

I've spent this year buying media professionally after eight years of doing it with my own money. It's been the single most informative year of my career and I'm reasonably sure it's the last one I'll spend doing this.

Not because I'm bad at it. Because the job is being automated by the entity that sells it to you, and everyone doing it can feel the floor moving.

The trajectory is not subtle#

Every year, the platform takes over more of what the buyer used to do. Targeting selection, bid management, budget allocation across a campaign, placement decisions. Each of these was, at some point, a thing a skilled human did better than the machine, and each of them stopped being that.

The pitch is always efficiency, and the pitch is honest — the automated version usually does perform better. That's what makes it inevitable rather than a conspiracy. You can't refuse a tool that beats you.

What's left as it recedes: creative, offer, and the parts that require knowing things about the business that the platform can't see. Which is genuinely valuable work, and it's not the work "media buyer" describes.

Why the platform's interests aren't yours#

This is the part I understand much better after a year on the inside.

The platform wants spend to grow and it wants friction to fall. Every automation ships because it moves those two numbers. It is not trying to eliminate your job — it's indifferent to your job, which is worse, because indifference doesn't negotiate.

There's also a structural thing: as the platform absorbs more decisions, it absorbs more of the information about why results happen. The buyer's understanding of their own account gets thinner every year. You end up managing a system you can observe but not inspect, and the platform is the only party who can see the mechanism.

That's a bad long-term position for a professional. Your expertise is increasingly about a black box that the box's owner keeps changing.

What I think holds value#

Knowing what to sell and what to charge. I wrote earlier this year that the ad account is downstream of the business, and a year in has only made me more sure. The decisions with real leverage are upstream and no platform is automating them.

Producing creative at volume. The binding constraint on a large account isn't buying, it's feeding. That's an organizational capability and it doesn't compress into a feature.

Owning a relationship with the customer that isn't rented. Email, SMS, anything where you can reach the person again without paying an auction for the privilege. This is the direction I keep circling.

Understanding the whole funnel rather than the top of it. Everything after the click — the site, the checkout, the follow-up, the second purchase — is where most of the recoverable money is, and it's structurally uninteresting to the ad platform, which means nobody is automating it for you.

The honest career advice#

If you're good at this, you have some years of a well-paid seat. Take them. Don't build an identity on it.

Spend those years learning the business the ads sit on top of, because that's the part that's still yours in ten years. The specific tactical knowledge you're accumulating right now has a half-life that's shorter than your career and you can feel it decaying if you pay attention.

I came into this year for the vantage point. What I've mostly learned is what to stop doing, which is less exciting than a business idea and is probably worth more.