adlingo.org
The skills that survive
August is a particular kind of _rough_ in this industry.
If you are in ad tech sales, you probably know what I am about to say. The year is effectively over for new business. Whatever you have in the pipeline ought to close for a 2027 start, but new opportunities are not materializing right now. And they will not until Q1.
We are in the part of the year where you manage what ya got. It's a strange headspace to be in when the calendar still says Q3.
Then we seem to have the never-ending AI-attributed riffs happening across the industry. Colleagues with roles in heavily process-driven parts of the business are dropping out of the market, either by force or by choice. Their roles are not being backfilled.
So that layers on a particular flavor of suck to the day-to-day workload.
At the same time, there are increasingly bright and positive themes emerging. **Relationships are not going away.**
### Strategic judgment
The ability to sit across from a difficult client, make them feel heard, and also be right. [That last part is the tricky one.] You can find a thousand people in advertising who will make a client feel heard. Finding someone who will also be right, and still manage to keep the relationship intact...that is a rarer skill.
And here is the thing nobody says out loud: you cannot automate a decade of being trustworthy. You cannot prompt your way to someone wanting to pick up the phone when they have a problem. That trust is built call by call, meeting by meeting, over years.
### Account service
Done well, CS isn't a workflow. I have watched agencies and ad tech companies try to systematize it for decades. CRM platforms, contact trackers, check-in templates, meeting cadences. All useful. _None_ of it is account service.
Account service is knowing when a client is actually frustrated versus when they are just performing frustration for their boss who is also on the call. It is reading the damn room on a quarterly business review when the numbers are fine, but the relationship is not. It is the follow-up call you make that nobody told you to make.
No AI model has that.
### Taste
Creative with real taste and real risk is the same story.
You _can_ prompt your way to a deck of options. You can get a hundred images in the time it used to take to brief a designer. None of that is creative direction.
Creative direction is the judgment call about which option to show the client, because you know this client, you know this brand, and you know what this room will do when they see something genuinely strange and new.
It is the willingness to stake your professional credibility on an idea that has not been proven (yet). Taste is a point of view accumulated through experience and failure and occasional triumph.
It is not an output measured in tokens.
### Judgement
Let's talk about judgment for a second. I think we conflate it with analysis, and that is a real problem. Anyone with a decent model can run the analysis now. Genuinely. The analysis is table stakes.
Judgment is what you do after the analysis, when the data points in one direction and your read on the client, the market, and the brand points somewhere slightly different.
Judgment is the willingness to say "I think we should do this" and stake your credibility on it. And not for nothing, most companies underappreciate how much of their success is built on the backs of individual employees' personal credibility.
Models do not stake credibility. Models do not _have_ credibility to stake. That is the line. That is the thing that does not get automated.
### BD
And let's not forget business development. Winning new business is an interpersonal sport.
The RFP process is a performance, and everyone at the table knows it. What actually moves the needle is not sending a better proposal. **It is being someone that people believe, trust, and want to work with.**
Whether they think you understand their problem in a way that makes them feel less alone with it. Whether they **want to spend the next year in a room with you**. Artificial intelligence cannot "want" the business.
Advertising has always been a human-skills business, something we keep forgetting in our rush to look be a technology industry.
The people who win in this business, the ones who have long careers and earn real trust, they are not winning because they have the best platform or the best process. They are winning because they know how to read people.
They know how to hold a room.
They know how to take the client's baaaaad instinct and redirect it toward something better without making the client feel stupid.
They know when to push and when to shut the F up.
We are watching real job displacement in our industry, and I am not going to pretend that is not happening or that it is not painful. Transition sucks. It is hard. The anxiety is legit. If you are in the middle of it, I am not trying to minimize what you are going through.
Most of the cuts are the things that were always "tasks," even when we presented them as jobs. We've got a market-wide re-org after years of treating execution as strategy and process as expertise.
The answer? Get better at the things AI cannot do.
Sit across from a difficult client. Make them feel heard. Also be right. Navigate the tension between those two things with skill and grace.
Build a relationship over years, not quarters.
Develop genuine taste. Take a real creative risk.
Go get new business, not by sending a better RFP response, but by being someone that people believe, trust, and want to work with.
Advertising has always been a human-skills business. We just spent a while acting like it was not.
Time to act like it is again.
__Disclosure: AI assisted in the creation of images in this content.__
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