Everyone wants to be ‘easy to buy’
Analysis
“Making us easy to buy.”
Whose goal is that? Netflix EMEA vice-president Damien Bernet? Spotify UK and Northern Europe sales chief Ed Couchman? Reddit CEO Steve Huffman? Comcast Advertising president James Rooke? ITV commercial managing director Kelly Williams? Snap CEO Evan Spiegel? Pinterest CEO Bill Ready? Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg?
Technically, it was Bernet who said that exact quote. But if your answer was all of the above, you’d be equally on the money.
Over the past year, most major media owners have indicated that, in order to grow revenue, it is imperative for them to chase the long tail of advertisers.
That means simplifying, if not altogether automating, the buying process, developing generative-AI creative tools and providing outcome-based measurement so that marketers can understand the incremental impact of their adspend.
“We’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement — except to be able to read the results that we spit out,” Zuckerberg said during an interview with Stratechery this month.
“I think that’s going to be huge. I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”
Indeed, simply driving performance outcomes via programmatic buying isn’t enough to compete for the long tail. As Reddit chief operating officer Jen Wong described last autumn: “It has to be simple in order for smaller advertisers to take advantage of that, which means automation, really end-to-end simplicity.”
As of late last year, Reddit was “not there yet”, but is actively working to simplify its ad suite to “unlock more advertisers”.
Social competitors Pinterest and Snap have both equally looked to the long tail to drive growth.
Pinterest is now “winning meaningful performance budgets” according to Ready, thanks in part to its Performance+ suite of AI tools for marketers. Snap, meanwhile, has ballooned its total number of active advertisers (+60% year on year in Q1), including nearly doubling (+85%) the number of active small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) advertisers on the platform during 2024.
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For Snap, brand advertising had become too “volatile“, with a lack of “stickiness” spooking Wall Street analysts and weighing on the company’s share price. SMEs, according to Spiegel, provide “much more resilient revenue from a diversified customer base” to smooth out growth prospects.
The same bet is being made not just by social platforms but also by streamers. Netflix expanded its programmatic offering in partnership with Google’s Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk in EMEA earlier this year. More recently, it has begun rolling out its in-house adtech suite in EMEA markets to deliver further flexibility and buying opportunities.
Spotify, likewise, is seeking to “remove friction” at each stage of the creative and media buying process via its new ad exchange, generative-AI creative tools and first-party measurement solutions.
Traditional media owners get in on the action
A lack of friction is equally important for audio companies like Bauer, as the number of ad exchanges in the UK doubles from two to four this year. Audio managing director Simon Kilby wants to ensure AudioXi is “easy to access and use” — and the same is doubtless true of News Broadcasting’s Octave and Global’s Dax.
TV broadcasters are increasingly wanting in on the action to start growing the TV pie, with a particular embrace of the “fat end of the long tail” (or FELT), as Williams has referred to it.
“It’s finding those brands that have probably been built on social media and paid search, but are ready to scale,” Williams explained at LEAD in February. “We’re spending a lot of our time as a television industry focused on that cohort at the fat end of the long tail and bringing in tons and tons of new advertisers.”
To make it possible for SMEs to invest in TV, ITV has enlisted the aid of AI for the purposes of producing creative.
Meanwhile, Comcast, through its Universal Ads effort in the US, has sought to make TV buying across partners (including A&E, AMC Networks, DirecTV, Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision, Warner Bros Discovery and Xumo) as easy as it is on social platforms.
“There has to be no learning curve,” Rooke said at The Future of TV Advertising in London last year. “Because these small businesses haven’t got time to learn things and these small businesses have been conditioned over the past few years on what simple looks like.”
Universal Ads has attracted interest from UK broadcasters in advance of a potential launch in the market. Channel 4 is “actively” looking at collaborating on initiatives like it, according to head of operations at Channel 4 Sales Barry John.
“Why wouldn’t you get involved in that?” Ewan Douglas, head of sales and business development, asked rhetorically during an interview with The Media Leader in February.
At the same time, Channel 4 is relaunching its streaming proposition for advertisers this year with the expressed goal of attracting more SMEs. As John explained to The Media Leader: “It’s about simplifying how you buy TV […] What we don’t want to replicate is some of the legacy complexity in buying our linear products.”
‘The SME tail is wagging the dog’: Thinkbox urges reconsideration of ad market
Ceding control
If Zuckerberg is correct and we will soon be moving to an ad industry that is increasingly automated, then with that comes risks — to brand safety, to media agencies’ usefulness to advertisers and to employment within the ad industry itself.
For brands that increasingly let the platforms do everything, they necessarily cede control — over creative decision-making and ad placement — to algorithms and, soon, AI agents.
Google this month announced new agentic capabilities in Google Ads Manager and Google Analytics that allow marketers to employ AI assistants to “take a lot of guesswork out of achieving business goals”, according to vice-president of global ad sales Dan Taylor.
He told a group of journalists that consumer use of AI is already changing search behaviour, with queries now becoming more complex, longer and conversational, and that “traditional media planning and marketing tactics are not able to keep up with this reality”.
“We really see the promise of agentic as the next frontier of increasing efficiency and performance with less effort,” he said.
It may be true that automated buying, in the way that Google and Meta envision, is effective at demonstrating business results. Big platforms’ ad models have become so robust that they can accurately predict campaign outcomes.
And perhaps that’s all that matters, especially for SMEs. But normalising a lack of transparency could be unwise.
As one ad agency executive told The Verge: “Brand safety is a big issue still, so letting them make and also optimise creative is a scary concept. […] The promise of his vision — ‘just read the results they spit out’ — is the problem. No clients will trust what they spit out as they are basically checking their own homework.”
That’s not to mention how the use of AI for generating creative opens up its own can of worms around artists’ copyright protection — a debate that has yet to be settled by government policy.
Former Meta executive and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said over the weekend that having to pay artists for the right to train AI on their content would “kill” the AI industry, effectively admitting that without the ability to break copyright laws, the house of cards would tumble.
Will agencies follow?
Is it time for agencies to follow media owners in pivoting towards SMEs? As The Media Leader columnist Omar Oakes wrote this month, the ad industry “keeps obsessing over whales” even though “the krill are paying the bills”.
Major holding groups are working to strengthen their positioning for an increasingly automated future, but this leaves their agencies in a bind: if more tasks can be automated by media owners, the more likely brands — even larger ones — are to consider in-house models or buying direct.
GroupM, WPP’s media buying arm, has already begun laying off employees as it reportedly rebrands to WPP Media and embraces automated solutions for clients.
At an all-staff meeting held in March and relayed to The Media Leader by multiple sources, GroupM CEO Brian Lesser controversially indicated that, within the next four or five years, there will “probably” be media plans that “leave the building” that no planner ever saw.
UK CEO Kate Rowlinson later clarified to The Media Leader that Lesser “certainly didn’t say plans wouldn’t be overseen by humans”, but rather that “tactical planning and optimisation will increasingly be managed by machines”.
Talent will thus “move upstream”, she suggested, with media planning becoming “much more about strategy, innovation, measurement and analytics”, while machines “do the heavy lifting and optimisation”.
As every media owner under the sun has described, the whole point is for ads to be easier for brands (of all sizes) to purchase. It doesn’t take a media executive to know that fewer people will be needed to complete fewer tasks, even if they are “upstream”.