Mike Lane sold dealer.com in 2014 after 16 years, 700 employees, billions in ad spend.
These days he's running Fluency, an operating system for digital advertising.
A single media strategist today has to run Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, CTV, each its own beast, while margins shrink and budgets don't.
Fluency pulls in a client's data, runs it through reusable playbooks, and sets up and optimizes campaigns across every channel automatically. Work that took eight hours becomes a button.
His bet: advertising is moving onto systems the same way stock trading left the paper floor for E-Trade and Schwab. Ten years out, doing it by hand won't be an option.
In the episode we also get into:
→ How creative is being pulled inside the media workflow. AI generates the options, testing picks the winner, but a human still owns the publish button.
→ Why "advertising engineer" is becoming a real job title
→ What clients mean when they say "I don't know what my agency is doing anymore"
Worth a listen if you build, run, or sell advertising.
