What you need to know:

• Jack Myers, a media ecologist and founder of NY-based MediaVillage, predicted both the rapid automation of media planning and buying and the rise of retail media.
• Within five years, he now predicts 80 per cent or more of all planning and buying will be done without needing humans.
• Plus while Myers forecasts a good year for media and advertising this year, 2025 will mark the start of a major pullback as marketers grapple with AI’s implications.
• He also expects to see rapid consolidation across media and agencies as AI forces creative and media back together.
• There are naturally implications for jobs – though Myers thinks the young will thrive and overall numbers will stabilise.
• The adtech supply chain is likewise set for serious consolidation, “a collapse” per Myers, while retail media risks shooting itself in the foot by lifting the arbitrage playbook.
• He also has serious concerns about the push into data clean rooms – though concedes that the data “have nots” have little chance of survival.
• But mid-term, Myers sees reasons for optimism – predicting a “rebirth” of the advertising business from 2026.
• There’s always more in the podcast. Get the full download here.

Jack Myers has form in calling it right, early. Tapped deep into the US media market for four decades, Myers before that studied media ecology at NYU, under his mentor the Technopoly author, educator and cultural critic Neil Postman who founded the program. Postman in turn was mentored by Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher and one of the founding fathers of media theory (McLuhan coined the term “the medium is the message” and the “global village” enabled by electronic media, and predicted the advent of the web some three decades before it was invented). McLuhan, per Myers, "was a follower of Aldous Huxley", whose depiction of a culturally void society consumed by the spectacle of its own trivial pursuits now risks reclassification as non-fiction. 

A lofty set-up, perhaps, but Myers thinks media and advertising is about to enter a brave new world of its own – and a big chunk of it will no longer require humans.

Within 12-18 months, per Myers, most media planning will be entirely machine learning-led. Right now his data shows on average that 45 per cent of all media is traded programmatically in the US and another 25 per cent is automated with human oversight. By 2030, he suggests, “80 per cent or more of all media planning and buying will be done without human intervention or without the necessity of humans” and it will be “increasingly impossible for media buying to be done without machine learning”.

Humans are already being displaced – in part because they have failed to stop the skim within digital media, where “50, 60 sometimes even 70 per cent of the advertisers’ spend is not getting to the publishers,” Myers suggests. For that reason, “We’re at the beginning stages of a backlash against programmatic,” he says, with machines now being deployed to root out fraud, false claims and wastage.

“We're seeing a lot more emphasis on performance, on attribution – all of those tools are coming under deeper inspection. And in an ironic sort of way, it's the AI tools that are doing the inspection. Machines are actually checking on machines, so increasingly, humans are out of the mix.”

More broadly, Myers forecasts massive shrinkage across the media supply chain – both publishers and the middlemen – as one phase of digital disruption completes and another AI-led cycle begins.

“We're really in the end stage of long-term transformation wrought by digital and the internet in terms of the legacy media companies increasingly consolidating,” says Myers. He points to David Ellison’s [son of Oracle co-founder and big Republican donor Larry Ellison] imminent deal for Paramount, and last week’s ending of a two-year, tax efficient M&A freeze by Warner Bros Discovery after its deal with AT&T for WarnerMedia, as next likely movers, with knock-on M&A following suit.

Clean room boom

However the consolidated landscape ends up, Myers thinks data – and the ability to monetise it – will likely determine winners and losers. He points to Disney’s activity in that area.

“Disney for example has over 100 clean rooms. Rita Ferro [Disney’s advertising president] has been very open about the fact that they will create clean rooms where individual advertisers – through their agency partners or directly – can put their first party data into a dedicated clean room. Disney will then take its first party data, match it and find the right Disney inventory that's most relevant for those consumers,” says Myers. Plus, it’s working with retailers like Kroger via a data matching partnership – increasingly the shape of things to come as TV and streaming businesses aim to take a slice of retail media action while retailers head off-network into connected TV, and hence why the likes of Nine locally are pushing in that direction. 

“All the major media companies now are ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. If you don’t have first party data, through subscriptions, through credit cards … you are screwed fundamentally as a media seller. It means you will have to go into a programmatic pool and then [the likes of] The Trade Desk and others will compile the clean rooms and clean the data before [matching with] their first party data … which creates a whole lot of other questions and concerns,” suggests Myers.

Such as what?

“My biggest reservation about clean rooms is who is cleaning the data, who is validating that it is clean, who is judging and making the decisions on how to use that data?” says Myers. “Is it going to be used for political purposes? We are already seeing [all of the big social platform data] being used to target more effectively for political purposes … and that just opens a whole can of worms,” he says, especially with the advent of AI, which left unchecked risks society being pushed further towards “a more autocratic world”.

“But if you depend on advertisers to be smart and pay attention and make a difference and change things, that's not the right place to look for change, unfortunately.”

Adtech, retail media impacts

Myers predicts even bigger upheaval for the ad tech sector – at least for all but the biggest players.

“We're on the verge of what I believe will be a major consolidation – you could even call it a collapse – of the programmatic marketplace in terms of the hundreds of companies that are in the business today,” he says.

For similar reasons, Myers thinks that retail media may be set for some consolidation, “there’s just too many players”.

Moreover, while expecting retail media channels to keep growing dollar share – he suggests US analyst Brian Wieser’s forecast of a $51bn retail media market this year in the US alone is an “underestimate” – Myers thinks retail media may now start to face similar accusations to those that have dogged the broader programmatic market. That is, “whether they are in fact, arbitraging non-retail media inside the retail media networks”.

Some, such as US-based analytics provider Adalytics, think that is the case, primarily via Amazon. Myers suggests exposure of such behaviour risks “opening [another] can of worms”, though others would argue that people have been shouting about made for advertising, arbitrage and the rest for years and marketers have paid little heed.

Then there’s the revival of an old US anti-trust law – The Robinson-Patman Act, now receiving renewed attention from the FTC – that may yet come into play. (In theory it could be used to prevent advertising and pricing discrimination between manufacturers and the different retailers that they use to sell through. As such, the Act appears at odds with retail media’s fundamentals – but has not yet been tested in a retail media context, though Coke and Pepsi pricing practices are currently being probed.)

Creative, media back together?

For agencies, Myers forecasts AI’s primary impact will be to push creative and media back together again after decades of separation.

“The re-emergence of the consolidated agencies, creative and media, that's the big story for me for 2025-26,” he says. “With AI, it has to start feeding the creative component into the attribution again, and look at the two together. And that's going to be where the industry is going to reinvent itself.

“So I look positively at the opportunities for advertising [in the AI age]. But we're just moving too quickly for the industry to adapt … Those who can't adapt, ultimately, are going to disappear. It's like retailing, if you didn't adapt to the emergence of ecommerce or find a place in the retail marketplace for in person shopping and experiences, you are going to disappear,” says Myers. “So I believe 2024-25, we're going to see massive consolidation, massive contraction, and then in 25, 26, 27 a rebirth of the advertising business.”

Job cuts inevitable?

So where does that leave people? Local agency bosses have privately conceded to Mi3 that headcount reductions of circa 20-30 per cent are likely in the next two to three years. Some ‘stealth’ layoffs have already taken place across both agencies and media groups, with rumblings in recent weeks that marketers may likewise be starting to face cuts.

But Myers thinks agencies may ultimately end-up with similar headcounts – and will just move people out of the areas that become machine-led and into other parts of the full-service agencies that still require more human input. Though in most cases he predicts young talent will more quickly displace older hands.

“As the current generation evolves, there are more diverse, they're more scientific, they're more data-oriented – they will be more likely to have a place in this future business than those who are currently in the business 15 years-plus who are going to be increasingly out-dated,” per Myers.

“So I think those who are early stage now will have a long potential career; those who are coming into the business [now] will [also] have a long potential career. Those who have been in the business for 15 years-plus? I think it's going to be a tough future for them.”

Necessary growing pains?

In fairness, Myers thinks it’s going to be tough for everybody – at least for a couple of years.

“2024, the media and advertising economy will continue to be strong. The holding companies will continue to look good in the in the stock market,” he predicts.

After that, he’s forecasting pain for most.

“We're going to see tremendous shifts and consolidation, contraction at all levels and 2025, I believe, is going to be a very difficult year for the advertising economy globally for a variety of reasons,” says Myers. “Not least of which will be that the implementation of AI is going to create a lot of need for reallocation and refocusing of spending – and probably a reasonably massive cutback in spending – as marketers figure out what's working and what's not working.”

But Myers thinks that pain will be short-lived – a turf burning that clears the ground for new growth.

“In 2026-27, I believe we're going to see a re-emergence of the combination of creative and media and AI becoming more of a force and the marketplace beginning to sort itself out,” per Myers. “So 2024 is going to look pretty much like what you're already seeing in the marketplace in the first half. 2025 is the year of decline, disruption, economic concerns, some real failures and massive consolidation, and then 26, 27, 28 is the beginning of what I think will be several decades of a reimagined industry.”

There’s always more in the podcast. Get the full download here.