The new paid media team
The new paid media team
There is a version of this conversation that stays comfortable. The role is evolving, new skills are needed, teams will adapt. That version is true, but it is not urgent enough to be useful.
The more honest version is this: most paid media teams are currently organised around work that AI-led systems have already absorbed, measured by metrics that reward the wrong behaviours, and led by people who know something needs to change but do not have a clear picture of what that looks like or the support to get there.
That is not a criticism of the practitioners in those teams, it is a description of a structural gap that leadership has been slow to close.
According to Gartner, only 15% of CEOs view their CMOs as having the AI readiness needed to be effective in 2026. That figure is striking not because it suggests CMOs are unintelligent or disengaged, but because it reveals something more specific. The gap is not really about understanding AI in the abstract; it is about whether marketing leadership has genuinely understood what AI has already done to the operating model they are responsible for. Most have not, and the teams reporting to them are carrying the consequences of that.
The PPC manager is the clearest example of where that gap shows up in practice.
For years, the best performance media practitioners built their credibility through platform expertise. They knew how to structure campaigns, respond to volatility, extract marginal gains and manage complexity inside Google and Meta interfaces. That expertise had genuine value because execution depended on it; the more experienced the person, the better the outcome. Scale came from people.
That relationship has changed materially. PMax and Advantage+ have absorbed a significant portion of what used to define that role. Deployment, bidding, pacing and audience optimisation now happen continuously inside systems that respond to signals faster than any individual can. The practitioner who constantly intervenes in that process is more likely to disrupt system learning than to improve performance.
This puts practitioners in an uncomfortable position through no fault of their own. The skills that earned them their reputation are the same ones that, applied in the old way, can now actively get in the way. Nobody told them that was coming.
Most organisations have not updated what success looks like for those roles, changed the metrics they are measured on, or invested in helping them develop in a different direction.
Telling a PPC manager they need to think more strategically while still measuring them on platform efficiency scores is not a development plan; It is a contradiction, and it creates the kind of quiet frustration that either leads to good people leaving or good people staying and operating below their potential.
What the role needs to become is something closer to strategic orchestration. Understanding how AI-led systems behave, knowing what inputs shape their decisions, and being able to translate commercial priorities into the objectives, constraints and guardrails those systems operate within. Knowing when to let the system run, when to tighten the parameters, and when the signals coming back suggest something has shifted in the market that the system cannot see on its own.
That requires commercial fluency that most performance media roles have not historically demanded. Understanding margin, not just revenue. Understanding demand signals, not just efficiency metrics. Being able to sit in a conversation with a trading director or CFO and discuss what contribution paid media is actually making to business outcomes, not just what the dashboard says.
The practitioners who are making this transition well are not abandoning what they know. They are building on top of it. Platform knowledge still matters. Understanding how systems behave is genuinely useful. What changes is the orientation. Less time inside campaign interfaces, more time understanding what the business is trying to achieve and whether the evidence supports doing more, less or something different.
For CMOs and Heads of Performance, the responsibility here is significant and, in many cases, not yet being met.
The development work required is not complicated, but it requires genuine intent rather than aspiration. Giving performance teams visibility of margin data, including them in commercial planning conversations before targets are set, rather than after. Building fluency with concepts like incrementality and causal thinking rather than treating those as someone else's problem. Rewarding judgement and commercial thinking alongside platform performance.
The structure of the team shifts as a consequence of getting that right, not as a precondition for it. Fewer people are needed in the operational layer because the operational layer increasingly runs itself. The value concentrates in people who can operate at the intersection of media, commercial planning and evidence. Analysts stop producing reports and start designing the evidence the business uses to make decisions. Senior roles become less about technical depth and more about the ability to influence decisions across functions.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, we've mapped out the roles, responsibilities and skills for the new paid media team in a one-page download.
Guardrails become a central part of the work in a way they have not been before. When AI systems are making continuous decisions about deployment, someone has to own the boundaries they operate in. Areas to be considered:
- Which products get prioritised?
- What risk tolerance is acceptable?
- How the business wants to behave when short-term efficiency signals conflict with longer-term demand signals.
These are commercial decisions, not platform settings, and they need people with the right context to make them deliberately.
The alignment with finance matters more than most performance teams currently estimate. Not as a reporting relationship but as a working one. Finance needs to be close enough to media decisions to understand the trade-offs being made, and media teams need to be fluent enough in commercial language to make that relationship productive. Where that alignment exists, decisions move faster and with more confidence. Where it doesn't, both sides end up frustrated, and the business operates below its potential.
The reason this is urgent rather than simply important is that the window for getting ahead of it is narrowing. AI systems like Upp.ai are already connecting execution, measurement and planning in ways that change what the in-house team needs to own and how it needs to operate. Retailers who build the right team shape and capability now find that technology accelerates what they can do. Those who wait will find themselves trying to retrofit a team structure designed for a previous era onto a system that has already moved on.
The teams that performed well during this period will not necessarily be the ones with the most advanced technology; they will be the ones where leadership took the people question seriously, gave practitioners the space and support to develop in the right direction, and stopped measuring the future by the standards of the past.