Expanding on Point 03 from The 2026 Marketing Playbook
I wrote in our 2026 Playbook that one of the biggest shift in media this year wouldn’t be in strategy, but in operations. We’re now halfway through the year, and I feel this shift is well underway. But most teams are still set up for a world that’s disappearing.
What's being automated?
The transactional layer of media buying (campaign builds, bid management, budget pacing, optimisation signals) is increasingly handled by the platforms themselves. Meta’s Advantage+, Google’s Performance Max, TikTok’s Smart Performance Campaigns. These tools are not perfect, but they are getting materially better, and the ceiling for what they can do autonomously keeps rising.
The practical implication is that a junior media buyer spending their day in Ads Manager making manual bid adjustments is doing work that the platform is already doing around them. The human time is going in, but the marginal value is shrinking fast.
What that means for the role
This is not a story about job losses, but rather evolution, and for the people who adapt, it’s actually a better job.
What automation can’t do is think. It can’t interrogate a brief, identify a creative gap, read a cultural moment, or make a judgment call about whether a strategy is aligned with where a brand needs to go. Those things still require a person. And increasingly, they’re the only things that do.
The media buyer who will thrive in 2026 and beyond is not a platform operator. They’re a strategist. They understand performance data deeply enough to know what the numbers are actually saying. They have a commercial perspective. And critically, they understand creative; not just which formats perform, but why, and what to do about it.
The wrong setup
Two problems tend to show up together, and they’re both expensive.
The first is structural over-investment in execution. Teams resourced heavily for manual buying tasks, the kind of tasks that automation is steadily absorbing. The headcount is there, but the work it was hired to do is contracting. What’s missing isn’t more people doing the same thing. It’s different people doing a different thing.
The second is the silo between media and creative. This is perhaps the more damaging of the two, because it tends to be invisible. Campaigns where the media team is optimising brilliantly but the creative isn’t working. Briefs that go to creative without performance context. Creative reviews that don’t include anyone who knows what the platform rewards.
The buying is technically sound, but the assets are doing nothing.
These two problems compound each other. A team over-resourced on execution and under-resourced on strategy doesn’t have the bandwidth or the mandate to fix the creative problem. So both persist.
What the right setup looks like
Fewer people doing transactional work, more people doing strategic work. Media and creative teams operating in genuine partnership with shared briefs, shared performance data, and shared accountability for results. Media buyers who can contribute a point of view on creative, and creative teams who understand the environments their work is being placed in.
This is also where the connection to creative diversity (Point 01 of the Playbook) becomes operational, not theoretical. The reason creative diversity matters is that the algorithms reward it. But the algorithms can only work with what they’re given. If the media team and the creative team aren’t talking, the strategy and the assets will keep pulling in different directions.
The setup question is about how the work is structured, who owns what, and whether the people in the room have the right skills for the job that actually needs doing and not the job that needed doing three years ago.
One more thing: brands need to come on this journey too
There’s a version of this conversation that happens inside agencies and in-house teams, and a version that needs to happen with clients and brands – and the second one is often harder.
The friction is familiar. A client notices that their media team isn’t logging as many hours in platform. Fewer manual changes, fewer optimisation notes in the weekly report, less visible activity. And the instinct is to interpret that as the team not doing enough.
That instinct is understandable. But it’s also increasingly wrong.
When an automated system is doing the bidding, the optimisation, the budget pacing, and doing it better and faster than a human could, the human’s time is more valuably spent elsewhere. On strategy. On creative. On the questions the algorithm can’t answer. Less time in Ads Manager is not a sign of less effort, but a sign of effort going where it should.
The brands that will get the most out of their media teams in 2026 are the ones that understand this distinction. That trust the automated solutions the platforms have built, because those solutions have earned a degree of trust. That measure their agencies and in-house teams on the quality of their thinking, not the volume of their manual interventions.
This isn’t a comfortable message for everyone. There are brands, clients, leaders, who equate activity with value, and changing that mental model takes time. But the teams still manually executing work that automation handles are not more rigorous, they’re just slower.
The industry is moving, but we need everyone involved to move with it too.
