Prophecies and Pleas of an Advertising Man, with Myles Younger

21-02-2024 • 1 hr 2 mins

You could say that the marketing field is going through exciting times right now. But you shouldn’t say that everything’s rosy. Here are examples of issues we’re grappling with:

The use of SaaS by Marketing may have freed us from being chained to the IT department, but after 25 years of binge buying all these point solutions, we’re saddled with loads of Technical debt, and the order to repatriate customer data from all these servers.

CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology out there, much of their time is used up by the C-Suite’s questions, leaving little time for them to manage marketing.

There’s the question of whether the agency-client relationship will survive with AI. Some say brands won’t need an agency as they will generate their own creative. Agencies like Publicis, who’ve poured huge sums into their media-platform CoreAI that monitors billions of consumer signals and can inform what ads should be made, when & where.

Because our field doesn't have standardized accreditation, our terminology isn’t uniform, and we make dialects for our company or industry. How’s that working for us? About as well as it did for those building the Tower of Babel.

My guest is Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. Since graduating from Northeasters 20 years ago, he’s been up and down the marketing industry block. He was a client-side marketer in the tech and financial services sectors, He founded and led an adtech company, Canned Banners, that was acquired. He worked as a VP at data consultancy MightyHive which became Media.Monks.

He is in a new role now at U of Digital, spearheading this education thought leadership to expand the company's educational offerings across different formats, learners, and markets

To me, he’s something of a modern-day David Ogilvy, who wrote his thoughts on his industry back in the day, in a book called “Confessions of an Ad Man”. Myles is just as outspoken on digital media and advertising topics, and the opinions he voices in trade publications and podcasts can come across as prophecies about this industry and sometimes pleas for how it could be better.

I caught up with him in Portland, OR, where he lives with his wife and three kids.

Timestamp/Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

0:03:25 Welcome Myles

0:04:55 Continuum of approaches to privacy

0:07:58 Our reliance on ad tech; its future

0:20:56 We can only go as fast as our people can

0:24:53 Tech debt we've brought on ourselves

0:31:50 PSA

0:32:37 Changes impacting platforms & ad agencies

0:42:44 Platforms exploiting advertisers in the name of Al

0:48:27 The good & bad of using their Cloud offerings