The Robo-Specialist is here, and his name is Albert. In 2025, does that surprise anybody?
It might raise your eyebrows to learn that he’s been around since 2010. But he hasn’t put Marketing Specialists and agencies out of jobs en masse. In fact, people are still seeking digital advertising certifications to pivot into this sector.
Let’s dig into this question: Why are people still hired in a space where a bot was built to do the job 15 years ago? And what if I told you that for the last five years, a startup has been building an entire agentic marketing team and that its manager will come next?
Where Is Albert Driving Value?
When I was working at one of the biggest advertisers on paid search in the mid-2010s, running paid search with big data took an army. Across SEM and Hotel Metasearch, I’d hazard the guess that our global team encompassed well over 50 people.
Data scientists designed bidding algorithms, and our technical product team tested them. Campaign managers pulled and analysed trends to explain weekly changes in performance and advise on pivots, while maintaining relationships with platform reps.
We even managed multiple local relationships at individual regions to get coverage across North America, Europe (EMEA to be exact), Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.
Not every company has such deep resources, nor the marketing budget size to justify a large in-house team. At the mid-size enterprises which I moved on to, Paid Media teams were one-fifth of the size at my first employer. A SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Specialist would adjust bids and negative keywords weekly with data reports pulled manually from the ad platform.
Adding scalable data pipelines and building automated reporting eased the manual workload on the Specialists and gave them easy access to long-tail performance trends, as well as daily and weekly diagnostics to spot changes and anomalies.
This was possible at mid-size national companies with 1,000+ employees, but what about companies that are even smaller? If there are only one or two specialists managing multiple channels, how can their work scale?
Albert aims to be that solution. What it does (Albert is not a “him”, if we don’t want to anthropomorphize) is to bring together data from various ad platforms to create and execute creative and campaign optimizations.
Sounds like what your Specialists or agency reps are doing now? Here are the caveats:
- Albert only takes in platform data from Google, Meta etc and can’t directly ingest internal data.
- Albert integrates with “Google Marketing Platform” (their words on their site) to support programmatic advertising. It’s unclear whether this is Google Campaign Manager or DV360.
Looking at the companies that have used Albert, such as Crabtree & Evelyn, Harley-Davidson, and niche players in retail, food, insurance and financial services, one trend emerged. Success from Albert, thus far, has either come from niche, high-margin companies, or well-defined product-specific pilots in larger ones.
As Sangeet Paul Choudary mentions in “Reshuffle”, the places where humans will operate in systems redefined by AI are where the risks and constraints are. And in this case, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), the codified P&L of paid marketing, is where AI and automation provide both significant opportunity and significant risk.
At the companies I’ve worked at, for example, we segmented paid social into prospecting and retargeting. Would I have wanted an autonomous agent to reallocate acquisition vs. retention funds?
Probably not. That constraint, I’d want to manage manually, according to the strategic priorities set for the business. And hence, in a company that has the headcount, that’s why we have human Specialists! Albert could help with the data, but in the companies where I worked, we built our own systems to handle this.
Now, we’ve got a whole team of Alberts!
The plot thickens, getting exponentially scarier.
My executive education course at University of Miami Herbert Business School brought Marketeam.ai to my attention. Welp, we have an entire team of robo-Specialists! And their names are Maya, Ella, Jane, and Daniel. Brand, social marketing, and content marketing are the premise of the women, and the hard-core techy genre of paid marketing is for the guy.
Just when you think, “oh, that’s cool, I get to be the boss of AI”, Marketeam tells you that won’t last for very long. Because Ted, the robo-manager, is coming your way.
Should we be worried that marketers are all headed for Unemployed Pte Ltd? (Term courtesy of Sebastian Chen from SG60 Voices from the Heart).
Let’s look at the list of secret prompts on the Marketeam website. I’m going to start with Daniel, since paid media marketing was where I last worked before going freelance.
Daniel’s prompts resemble what we’d ask for from any Specialist: gap analysis, competitor analysis, keyword analysis. Or an analyst: forecasting the impact of budget changes, dashboarding, analyzing and recommending bidding optimizations.
Who audits whether Daniel is getting clean data? And who prioritizes Daniel’s tasks?
Although Marketeam is targeting its business model to small local businesses in Israel who can’t afford internal marketing headcount, it’s clear from the above that a seasoned expert needs to come in, even if on fractional time, to orchestrate and audit the agents’ work. Even with Ted leaning in on strategy, the risk to ROI is real without human involvement and orchestration.
They May Have Names, But They’re Not People
Ella, Maya, Jane and Daniel are marketed as experts in their field. But have we peeled the onion on where they got their expertise from? The answer, to all the naysayers who say that Marketeam will be agency-killing, is… an agency! The founder of Marketeam is a former agency professional!
What does this mean? Every agency has a different strategy, and if agencies trained their own agentic teams with their expertise, each team would have its own secret sauce.
Not to mention that different business segments would need specialized training data tailored to their vertical to attain commercial advantage. To make these agents truly augmentative for a larger company with the resources, I see the potential for in-house data scientists and marketing leaders to collaborate with agency partners in designing, maintaining, and implementing the training data and the feedback loop.
What do you think – will Albert, Maya, Ella, Jane, and Daniel drive the marketing profession out of work?
In Part 12, I’ll throw in another hot topic on AI in marketing: does generative AI replace creatives? Stay tuned…