Paid media therapist

Paid media practitioners are paid to optimise, organise, strategise, hypothesise, and probably quite a few more of those “ise” verbs. These are our "on-paper” tasks, but we can’t do any of those things well if we don’t listen, empathise, build trust, be transparent, and overall, be a decent person.

For anyone unfamiliar with therapy sessions (although I’m sure those in the industry are well acquainted with a therapy session or two), the structure of a session typically goes like this (attn: paid media specialists, note the word “typically”, it’s important not to state things as absolutes if we can’t guarantee something):

1. The check-in
   
2. The nitty-gritty
   
3. The closing remarks and takeaways
   

The check-in:

“So...how have you been doing?” This question gives the therapist great insight into how their patient is doing, so they can meet them where they’re at. Getting insight into someone’s emotional state can help approach a conversation with more discernment, tact, and empathy. In an ideal meeting with a client, this could be asking the client how their business has been going or how their week has been.

You might get replies like:

Scenario 1

“Our one and only graphic designer resigned, so we’re relying on Bob from accounting to design ads on Canva.”

Imagine knowing this before declaring “ad fatigue” and demanding your fourteenth creative refresh of the month. The only fatigued thing in this moment is your client. There’s room for empathy and tact in situations like this. Your creative refresh can wait, and likely needs actual backing because unfortunately, we can’t claim ‘ad fatigue’ based on a gut feel.

Scenario 2

“Our supplier doesn’t have stock of our apple flavour, so we don’t have stock of our best-selling product. Revenue has tanked.”

It’d be great to know this information before announcing a total ROAS emergency and shoving all the blame on “limited budget” or “increased competition”.

The client would appreciate a response like, “ah that makes sense now, we can suggest [insert reasonable suggestion here]. Is this something you’re comfortable doing and is there anything else we can look into to ensure smooth operations on the ads side?”

Check in before blasting the client with questions or statements they might not have the capacity to listen to at that moment. Listening skills, empathy, and reading a room go a long way.

Once you get past the check-in, you can proceed to the nitty-gritty.

The nitty-gritty:

Each client has their own trust issues, stories of betrayal, growth goals, and control issues, to name a few. Sounds like familiar personal things you’d tackle in a therapy session? Stick with me.

Nearly all clients come with a history of past traumas. They have been burned by other agencies that have told them the wrong things. They were sold "absolutes" regarding performance, rather than the honest, "likely” or "typically." They were given hard “NO’s” to owning their own advertising accounts. The list of traumas can unfortunately go on.

These clients have a lot of rewiring to do. I read a quote recently from @francescapsychology on Instagram that said, “when old patterns are met with new responses, we begin to rewire our internal world”. What a lovely quote - how lucky are we to know that things can change.

Helping a client rewire can come in the form of:

Curiosity

If a client is concerned about poor performance, instead of acting defensively and blaming it on a “terrible” landing page, be curious. Ask the client what is making them worried about performance, or what poor performance means to them. If poor performance means seeing search impression share decrease by 0.01% on a random Tuesday, you can take a deep breath and manage their mild panic.

Honesty and transparency

Instead of blaming a crazy overspend on “increased demand” when you know very well you mistakenly added an extra “0” to your daily budget, own up to your mistakes, explain what you have put in place to try not to make the mistake again, and let the client know how it’s going to be rectified.

Integrity

There’s going to be a time when a client requests a questionable campaign or strategy with a really high budget to be implemented that you know is likely going to hinder their KPIs. A short-term management fee gain, based on a strategy that will hurt the client, will eventually hurt you. It’s important to push back on certain strategies with good reason.

Trust through shared knowledge

When a client has lost trust in certain automated campaign types due to a poor past agency experience, like an agency running automated campaigns without proper conversion tracking, tsk tsk - it’s important to inform the client as to why they were likely seeing terrible results from the particular campaign. Re-establishing trust through transparency and education about a product will likely open the doors to more productive conversations.

If the client asks why they can’t see their ad every time they search for it, you can simply give them the good ol’, ‘reasons why you can’t see your ads’ talk. To be honest, I can’t guarantee it’ll work, this one doesn’t seem to stick as much, but it’s worth a shot. Clients deserve to understand how their ads operate.

Essentially, you’re looking out for the well-being of your client - this is where relationships and partnerships start to thrive. If an agency treats clients well, through all the ups and downs, I can almost guarantee a stronger, healthier, and longer relationship between them.

Treating a client well means doing the meaningful, selfless, emotional work. It doesn’t mean taking out a client for a lavish meal to cover up for that campaign that was supposed to target a 30km radius around Cape Town, while back at the ranch, the location targeting was set to “all countries and territories” for a solid 2 weeks' worth of spend. Let’s be real, fancy meals aren’t setting a strong foundation for a long-lasting partnership, it’s just putting a band-aid on a wound that needed some pretty hefty stitches instead. A boujee dinner is even better when you’re not trying to buy trust and forgiveness.

The closing remarks and takeaways:

Now, we come to the end of the session. We’ve dug deep, we’ve gone through the performance, and attempted to understand and welcome the gorgeous nuances in tones, tactical mic mutes, hard-hitting questions, and unscripted human behaviour.

The client can take their learnings, we can take our learnings, and grow together. We can process what we’ve discussed and use it for good. Maybe we can even run some cool experiments or A/B tests because the client is feeling more open to exploration - the possibilities are endless and fun.

We must remember that it is an absolute privilege to help a small business achieve its first year of profit or to help a larger brand understand the "why" behind its growth.

As paid media practitioners, we must strive to ensure the most important optimisations we make are the human ones. To be more empathetic, more curious, more honest, more transparent, more real.