By Charles Lee Mathews. As marketing automation accelerates, a new fault line is emerging in the media profession, not between man and machine, but between craft and convenience.
Once prized for their strategic insight and campaign craftsmanship, media planners, buyers, and strategists are watching their roles become increasingly marginalised by algorithmic tools and AI-driven platforms. The promise of efficiency is being delivered, but will humans get left behind? And what can be done today to preserve the value of human judgment before it’s permanently written out of the marketing script?
“This may be an unpopular opinion, but media planner roles are in decline. Media buyer roles are dying. Media strategy roles are probably dying,” says Ryan Sauer, CEO of Redwood Analytics, offering a contentious view. Sauer worries about the effects of marketing automation and what it is doing to specialised media skills.
Marketing automation: dance of the keyboard tappers
He believes that an over-reliance on automation will see the de-skilling of new generations of media professionals. The reduced dependency on skilled resources, he argues, will result in keyboard tappers, who know what button to push because it is recommended by the system, but have no idea why they are pushing it, the impact it will have, and how to measure it.
“If execution is automated, where does strategic advisory or media craftsmanship come in?” Marklives MEDIA asked Sauer. “It doesn’t,” he responded.
Melanie Campbell, group MD of RAPT Creative, underscores this thinking. “Every task we automate is a skill we stop teaching. Young media professionals are being trained to feed dashboards, not decode audiences. Strategy becomes ops. Curiosity becomes compliance. Automation has a quiet cost: it erodes the future talent pool and replaces mentorship with machine-learning models,” she says.
A very human problem
Others in the industry echo Sauer and Campbell’s concerns about talent erosion. They see it not just as a skills crisis but as a warning about where this trajectory ultimately leads.
Nicolas van Zyl, CEO at Naritive Global, believes that the division of labour between humans and machines “isn’t just a tactical marketing question; it’s a profound societal conversation about the future we want to build. We are, at a dizzying pace, seemingly sacrificing everything, for example, privacy, genuine connection, perhaps even jobs, in the name of raw efficiency and a narrow definition of ‘effectiveness’.”
“This entire debate is often framed as a red herring, disguised by the global ‘AI arms race’ narrative: ‘If we don’t automate it, our competitors in the East/West will beat us to the punch!’ It’s a convenient narrative for some to justify cost-cutting, retrenching talent, and outsourcing accountability to the nebulous ‘third force’ of AI. It allows businesses to deflect blame and avoid taking responsibility for potentially dehumanising decisions. We urgently need to bring humanity and principled leadership back into our innovation process, focusing on why we innovate. The world is short on leaders willing to channel this critical conversation,” van Zyl says.
Weigh up the future
“When it comes to striking a balance, there are absolutely campaign elements that should never be fully automated, because they are inherently human,” says van Zyl, who offers the following examples:
- Being human: When you’re positioning a product, a service, a campaign, or even a business itself, you need a firm, empathetic understanding of the human being you’re speaking to. People tire of being treated like commodities, reduced to just another data point. You can’t automate genuine empathy, cultural nuance, or the spark of an idea that genuinely resonates with the human condition.
- Creative insight and narrative: While AI can generate permutations, the truly disruptive creative insight, the powerful narrative, and the emotional resonance that makes an ad “unmissable” is born from human experience, intuition, and collaboration. It’s the art of connecting, not just targeting.
- Ethical oversight and responsibility: Most critically, the ultimate responsibility for the moral and strategic impact of a campaign must remain firmly with humans. Marketers need to take genuine ownership of the business and marketing decisions around how we connect with one another.
Connection over convenience
“We need to place a higher value on human connection again. Machine learning should serve human judgment, not supersede it. It should free us to be more strategic, more creative, and more human, rather than pushing us towards an entirely automated, and ultimately, dehumanised, marketing landscape,” says van Zyl.
Greer Hogarth, group media strategist at RAPT Creative, agrees. “AI should function as ‘additional intelligence’, enhancing human capabilities rather than replacing them. It effectively ‘shortens the runway’ for repetitive tasks, creating space for human ideation and deeper insight.”
She goes on to note, “The ideal model is symbiotic: AI efficiently handles data-intensive tasks and real-time optimisation, while humans provide overarching strategic direction, ethical guardrails, creative vision, and nuanced understanding. There’s what experts call an ‘unautomatable core’. This is a creative strategy, emotional resonance, cultural sensitivity, brand safety, long-term strategic vision, and human connection.”
Humanity comes first
The future winners, Hogarth believes, will be those who embrace their distinctive humanness — that which has always made agencies distinctive. “Smart agencies are repositioning as ‘intelligence amplifiers’ and ‘ethical stewards’,” she says. “Value comes from what AI cannot do,” she adds. This includes “translating data into creative ideas and actionable campaigns, providing strategic foresight, navigating regulatory complexities, and maintaining human-centric personalisation”.
Hogarth says media agencies will evolve into strategic advisors. Their role will include forecasting, complex problem-solving, aligning with business outcomes, and interpreting cultural context. All of these offerings are crucial in South Africa’s diverse market, she rightly states. For the rest, media craftsmanship will focus on creative strategy, storytelling, contextual nuance, and quality control that balances immediate impact with long-term brand building.
Critical questions to ask
Van Zyl says that before handing over the strategic reins to algorithms, AI, or automation technology, CMOs and media agency leaders need to ask themselves the following questions:
- “How much strategic control do I retain?” Will this tool empower my team to innovate, or will it reduce them to input operators? Can we pivot quickly using human insight, or do algorithms lock us into a predetermined path?
- “Does this provide actionable human insight, or just more data?” We need data that fuels smarter decisions, not just endless dashboards. Does it tell you why something worked (or didn’t) in a way your team can learn from?
- “Does it augment human creativity, or aim to replace it?” Great brands are built on great ideas and authentic connections. If automation tries to automate the very soul of your brand’s messaging, it’s a non-starter.
- “Is this truly aligned with my business KPIs, or is it optimising for its own ecosystem?” Be cynical. Platforms have their own metrics of success. Ensure the martech serves your brand’s unique goals (like long-term value, true attention, brand recall), not just the vendor’s.
- “What’s the ethical footprint? And what happens to my data?” In an increasingly privacy-conscious world, blindly scaling without understanding data practices is a strategic liability. Transparency here is paramount.
A conscious coupling
The age of automation doesn’t have to mean the end of human insight, but it does demand a conscious recalibration. As AI tools become more embedded in marketing workflows, the media industry must resist the temptation to equate automation with advancement.
Strategic foresight, creative intuition, ethical leadership, and cultural intelligence remain irreplaceably human. The future of media skills and distinctiveness lives in the courage to choose craftsmanship over convenience, as well as humanity over AI hype.
Further reading: see part 1 here.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
