r/adtech

I work for a recruitment agency in London, and work solely with AdTech (DSPs, SSPs, DMPs etc) and media owners. I specifically recruit account managers.

I have in some sense fallen in love with the industry and I’m engrossed in it. I love recruitment and without sounding braggy I have done very well, I’ve billed almost £300K in the last year and have built really solid relationships with clients within the industry. This is my 2nd year in recruitment for context.

I have an undergrad in media and a masters in marketing analytics and have always wanted to work in media. I love my job but I’ve been thinking lately am I slightly wasting myself in recruitment. I’ve learned a lot about CS and AM in adtech and feel like I have a very decent understanding of programmatic and the ecosystem.

I’m starting to flirt with the idea of pivoting into account management within an ad tech business maybe being agency facing. I obviously don’t have hands on campaign experience but I think I have a solid foundational understanding of the ecosystem and have strong client management skills from recruitment - obviously not standard industry experience but I think it could be very transferable.

I earn very decent money currently and I know if I did move I’d have to take a cut but I’m just so lost as to whether it would be worth it.

Im 28 almost 29 and don’t want to blink and realise I’m too old to make such a pivot.

Has anyone ever made a similar move or have any advice or thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

Most major ad channels have a public transparency layer: Meta has the Ad
Library. Google has its Ads Transparency Center. TikTok has the Creative
Center. ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overview, however, have none of that – not
for competitors, and often not even for the advertiser's own team.

Adding AI Ads to Similarweb’s Ad Intelligence fills that gap with an Ads
Gallery that shows what ads are running and in what context.

For AI Mode & AI Overview, advertisers participating in Google’s broader
digital advertising programs are blind to ad placements in Google AI answers.
Most advertisers don't know whether their own ads are running in that context,
let alone how they stack up against competitors. Google’s visibility tools
don’t answer that question.

For ChatGPT, ads only show up when intent exists and is clarified from the
conversation, and the decision comes down to the combination of ad creative,
copy, and landing page. Rather than leaving advertisers to guess where their
ads are appearing, Similarweb’s AI Ads provides a direct look at what's
winning placement.

What makes Similarweb's approach unique is that these insights are drawn from
real user panel conversations, not synthetic prompts. We anticipate upcoming
releases of the AI Ads dataset will add advertisers' true share of voice, ad
categories, and conversational intent.

“When we started advertising on ChatGPT, we were flying blind, no visibility
into who else was in the auction or what was working,” says Jonathan Bar
Vardi, Head of Strategy at Natural Intelligence, a data-driven marketing
specialist that has become a top buyer of ChatGPT ads. “Similarweb changed
that. It shows what other advertisers don't know: who's spending, where
they're appearing, and what's driving performance.”

All the marketers boasting about millions of sales from completely AI generated ads always seemed pretty sus to me. Cause most people around me seem turned off by those ads, curious to know if anyone else thinks the same?

If advertisers eventually manage campaigns through AI agents instead of a DSP interface, what does the DSP become?

The execution layer? A set of tools exposed through MCP? Or does each major platform build its own agent and keep everything proprietary?

Looking at current AdTech hiring, broader agentic work is already showing up, but specific protocols like MCP and AAMP are still very early.

Curious what people here think: will agents open up the programmatic stack, or just become a new interface for the same platforms?