If you could change one thing in the industry, what would it be?

There’s a resource drought happening in the industry today. Technology has been treated as a solve-all and we’ve lost a lot of highly talented people.

I’ve always known that AI would take jobs. But I’d hoped that AI and agentic AI buying would be targeted at aspects of people’s roles that are repeatable and can be turned into automated tasks. Strategic human thinking cannot be done by AI and agents. Instead, they should provide people with the tools to free up their time to dedicate to the parts of their roles that are about developing strategies, creative concepts and meeting people.  What appears to be happening is that businesses believe AI can allow them to reduce their workforce. It’s creating a talent squeeze where fewer people are expected to manage increasingly complex roles. This impacts everything in our industry. Publishers struggle to deliver high quality journalism as they reduce their staff and rely on AI content. Agencies can’t make the most out of their strategic talent because they’re too bogged down in trying to run campaigns. And agency buyers lack the headspace to truly interrogate the ecosystem.

Yes, society needs to move on and embrace the new technology, but it can’t be to the detriment of the human touch.

If I could change one thing in this industry it would be steering companies away from getting rid of talented people, in the mistaken belief that machines will do it for them. We need to move away from ‘shoestring’ operations and give people the time to focus on the strategic work that moves the needle. We need to invest in people. I hope that as we lean more into AI and agentic buying, we use those efficiencies to reinvest in human brilliance.

How do you think advertising will change over the next three years?

Advertising workflows will be simplified and integrated, with humans in the loop supervising AI-driven processes. The hype around AI replacing humans will die out, creating a two-tier system: AI-managed, single-channel campaigns for small businesses and AI-aided, cross-channel campaigns managed by human experts for more professional advertisers.

What are you most passionate about achieving this year in media?

We have spent years perfecting the underlying technology required to operate in a restricted ecosystem controlled by privacy and the reduction of traditional signals. That work is now our baseline. Anonymised supports user privacy, reduces leakage and keeps data safe. The way that data and privacy should work.

I’m genuinely excited about being able to take our technology and give agencies and advertisers a competitive advantage. It’s something we’ve done recently with MI Media’s own client, Prostate Cancer UK. The charity faced the challenge of Meta’s healthcare category restrictions, which prevented conversion optimisation. By deploying Anonymised’s Audience Lift to create enriched lookalike audiences, MI Media’s campaign achieved a 35% reduction in cost per acquisition in just two weeks.

What I am most passionate about achieving this year is the rollout of our unique omnichannel solutions. Because our foundations are so robust, we can offer advertisers a level of audience intelligence and cross channel reach that is difficult to find elsewhere. I want to spend this year demonstrating how our bespoke approach to first party data activation provides a genuine competitive advantage. We enable our clients to achieve results that simply weren’t possible under the old models.

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Anonymised is an AI data platform for incremental audience targeting and campaign measurement – helping advertisers target and measure relevant audiences for increased reach and performance – without using or exposing personal data. Its privacy-enhancing technology couples cross-site data with on-device machine learning to allow accurate targeting and measurement of 100% consented audiences, across all browsers and devices. Its AI technology is crucial for the future of digital advertising since 60% of the web is effectively anonymous, and therefore addressable.