The dog, not the tail: Who really controls the media dollar?

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: for all the discussion about the impact of AI on advertising, the industry still obsesses about the wrong thing — for example, at Cannes. 

Most of the attention on the marketing impact of AI has been on creative, production and implementation. However, the much bigger disruption will be in media. 

Advertising this year will be a roughly $1.35 trillion industry, increasingly driven by algorithms. The digital bit is growing 15–20% and will cross $1 trillion for the first time, as opposed to the linear tv bit, which is declining 5–15% depending on the extent of live sports content. However, significant amounts of media remain opaque without sufficient use of data, personalisation, optimisation or measurement. 

AI, blockchain and quantum computing, which are coming fast down the track, will change all that rapidly. 

The hyperscalers are investing extraordinary amounts in AI infrastructure (the Big Four — Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — alone are projected to spend more than $5 trillion between 2025 and 2030), accelerating the automation of media planning, buying and optimization. All of this makes an old question even more important: whose money is it? 

It’s the advertiser’s. 

I have said for some time that we should stop talking about media planning and buying. It is media investment management, with an author’s credit to Irwin Gotlieb. 

If you were managing billions of dollars of financial assets (BlackRock manages over $14 trillion on its own), you would expect to know where the money was invested, what fees were being charged, what conflicts existed and what return you were generating, and carry out all that analysis by machine, not manually. 

Why should media be any different? 

At Monks, our media planning and buying model is designed to pull back the curtain on what actually drives value for their businesses. No ulterior motives, no agency centric commercial interests steering client investment decisions, just transparency into what can accelerate business outcomes. 

That is very different from the holding company model, historically described as “transparently untransparent.” Again, author’s credit to Irwin. 

AI, quantum and blockchain change all that. 

As technology makes transactions, data and outcomes increasingly visible and measurable, the “transparently untransparent” model will become increasingly difficult to sustain. It will be replaced by a “transparently transparent” model. 

But the black box itself is changing. 

Historically, transparency was about agencies, rebates, margins and intermediaries. Increasingly, the black box is the algorithm. 

AI will automate targeting, bidding, optimisation, measurement and creative. It should make media significantly more efficient and activate much more of the world’s currently non-activated media spend. 

But automation cannot mean abdication. 

Every platform has its own black box, and every platform has its own commercial interests that need to be minded. Platform attribution systems also lack transparency, modeling "attributed returns" with the objective being to get you to spend more money on their platform ... which at times aligns with what benefits the advertiser, but at other times a fast metric can be a false indicator of what drives business growth." 

The advertiser still has to own the data, set the objectives, understand the economics and measure the outcome. Otherwise, we simply replace one opaque system with another. 

Transparency is not the objective. Performance is. 

The question is simple:

Is the media system optimising for the client’s business, or is the client’s business being asked to optimise for the media system? 

Client procurement departments agonise over the tail, or the 10% or 15% or 20% they spend on “non-working” media costs (author’s credit to Keith Weed — a phrase I hate, as we work very hard for our money). However, they should focus on the dog: the 80–90% that they spend on media, along with the opacity of the media supply chain, discounts, margins on proprietary trading and media take-rates. 

It is the client’s money. They should know where it goes, who makes money from it and what they get in return. 

That’s “transparent transparency”. 

More importantly, that’s good media investment management. 

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.