“Will the local ad media industry even exist in the 5 years’ time? If you say yes, are you confident it will in 10?”

Chapter 1

Richard Pook

Co-founder youdooh

The Pursuit of ‘idea to done’ in advertising

When something is digital, people naturally expect it to be streamlined and automated. Ordering groceries or clothes, buying shares, learning a language, booking a holiday, ordering a taxi or riding the metro were once friction filled experiences but are now all seamless digital ones.

Digital advertising is no different. In a digital media world, clients still need great creative & strategic thinking, but when that strategy is set, they want their ads to be out there, for their campaign to be up and running and delivering strong performance without delay.

In other words, going from a great idea to done must be quick and seamless, with very little time spent in the messy middle of media. Unfortunately, the reality is that this messy middle is precisely where most of the time and effort is still spent in local advertising. For years, ad industry people spent countless hours crunching audiences, building schedules and negotiating media deals.

Today, technology can replace much of this work. You could even go a step further and say as planning & buying advertising is not a precise science and open to interpretation, it’s the perfect use case for most of it to be automated with AI.

AI has now reached a point that it can assimilate a strategy and diverse range of inputs, turn it into a coherent plan and then buy the media. Google and Meta are already way ahead with display, search and social advertising. Using AI from general human inputs and prompts, they will build you a campaign, create ads, choose the inventory to deliver it on, deploy the campaign and then optimise it.

This is a big issue for the local ad industry, and perhaps one that is the end of it if we’re not careful. Google and Meta keep most of that value from advertisers for themselves, with very little flowing through to local media owners, publishers or the economy.

So where does this leave the local ad industry? How can they use AI to eliminate the messy middle in traditional media and finally give Google and Meta a run for their money and marketers what they want?

Read more about that in Chapter 2: AI is changing how media is done