Paid Social in 2026: AI, Automation, and What Actually Works | Katt Wade

Zach:
Katt, thanks so much for jumping on the call again.

Good to see you again, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.

Could you start by just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background?

Katt:
Yeah, of course.

So I’m Katt. I’m 32 years old. I am a Paid Social Director in the UK.

I have a degree in photography, so not particularly related.

I’ve worked at an agency before, which was in the B2B space. I worked at a hosting company for a few months last year, and I also worked at eBay for seven years.

So quite a range.

Zach:
Yeah, that’s great.

Apart from your current role and your current job, what’s the role that you’ve enjoyed the most in your career?

Katt:
I loved working at eBay, I have to say.

I wouldn’t spend seven years somewhere if I didn’t love it, you would hope.

But it was just such a good time in lots of different ways.

There were so many things to do at all times. There was budget to be able to do things. There was lots of innovation and opportunities to do betas and stuff, and I loved that.

Being at such a large company as well, after being at a very small company with my first agency, going to that kind of huge corporation and being part of all that, I think a lot of people don’t like that actually, but I kind of enjoyed it in a way because you very much knew your place.

You knew your teams and I guess kind of knew you were part of something bigger.

But yeah, it just had a lot of opportunities.

I worked really closely with a lot of the platforms.

I’ve been and had dinner with Facebook in Seattle before now. I’ve had my nails done with Pinterest.

Lots of different things.

Zach:
That sounds like some pretty cool perks to the job.

Katt:
Yeah, absolutely.

Zach:
It doesn’t necessarily have to be at eBay, but just throughout your career, is there a specific campaign or a project that’s really tested you and taught you something unexpected?

Katt:
Yeah.

A lot of the stuff I do right now is, I guess, what you’d call BAU or always-on type activity, so less of the campaign-style stuff.

Although one thing I have been working on that’s been really interesting is a big brand awareness brief for one of the clients.

It’s so outside the realms of what they would do normally.

That’s been challenging to make sure that they know what’s going on, but also just really interesting for us.

But one of the things I did whilst at eBay was what I guess I called “Project Make Pinterest Work,” because that’s kind of what was said to me one day.

It was basically all parts of it.

We had been running Meta for a long time. We knew how to do it efficiently, and it was, “We want to make Pinterest do the same thing.”

So I had to be involved in all of the feed integration, briefing creatives, working with different internal stakeholders who worked across different categories, for example.

I ended up for a few months actually switching my hours.

Three days out of the week, I did 12 until 8 p.m. so that I was closer to the U.S. time zone because I needed to work with them so much.

Every part of that was a huge learning curve of not really being able to take the exact learnings from Meta and just transfer them over, because it’s such a different platform.

The audiences react so differently, all of that kind of stuff.

There was a lot of need to work really closely with measurement.

We were doing different brand lift studies at the same time to measure how it was doing. We were doing conversion studies.

I’m pretty sure the first month of data wasn’t tracking correctly and we lost that, which was another kind of, “God,” especially when it’s all on your head.

But you work past things.

It was a big six-month slog to even get it live.

Then once it was live, trying to constantly troubleshoot and get it working, and really learning what the Pinterest platform was good for.

Zach:
You mentioned something about typically working on always-on rather than on campaigns in particular.

Could you break that down a little bit for us?

There was a little bit of nuance there maybe between those two.

Katt:
Sure.

There are a couple of ways that, whether you’re client-side or agency-side, you will work on marketing as a whole.

You may be briefed on specific campaigns.

So, “We have this thing that we want to push out, or this messaging that we want to push out, live for a certain period.”

I find at the moment especially I do a lot less of that.

It’s mostly this thing we call BAU, or business as usual, sometimes called always-on or evergreen, which is that consistent line that is there to drive revenue, essentially.

A lot of what we do, we may have spikes of campaigns here and there, but it’s mostly, “How can we make sure that we are running this always-on stuff that is consistently and efficiently driving revenue for the client?”

It’s a slightly different way of doing things and is very much revenue-based, as opposed to often a campaign brief will be getting people to site, getting people to watch your video, something like that.

Zach:
I want to talk a little bit now about your day-to-day.

What does your typical day look like for you?

Katt:
Madness, at least right now.

Agency life is not for the faint-hearted.

But it’s good.

Especially at the level that I’m at now, it’s a lot of meetings.

I lead on a few different clients, and some clients I’m just kind of more in the background doing my thing.

But that leading especially takes a lot of time in terms of keeping up the correct communications, having calls, making sure that you’re keeping the teams accountable, kind of facilitating people to do their work, which is a big part of it.

But also internally, there’s always a lot going on.

We’re always talking to each other, always collaborating on things.

I get pulled in to assist people with learning or QAing, or just trying to give them some ideas on something that they might not know as much about.

I obviously also do spend a lot of time in-platform still, where I’m setting up campaigns, optimizing stuff like that.

At the moment especially, this week has been very data-heavy for me because we do a lot of reporting and other things.

Something that I think is a really key part of what I do is really analyzing data, delving into it, and finding opportunities for stuff.

So just as an example, a client is finding that overall their click-to-land ratio, so the percentage of people who click and actually make it to the website, is lower than we would like it to be.

It’s lower year over year.

So we’re looking into where that breakdown is happening.

Is it to do with the formats that we’re using?

Is it to do with placements?

Kind of analyzing all those different bits to see where we can improve things on a much larger scale, basically.

Zach:
Working in agency land, there are a lot of clients, probably other partners too that you guys work with, maybe even other agencies that you work with.

You mentioned being in that leadership role too and having lots of people internally that you’re trying to facilitate.

What does that collaboration look like for you between people internally and also external clients and other agencies?

Katt:
In terms of the internal side of things, it is very collaborative.

It’s a very buzzword thing, but it is incredibly collaborative because we’re always trying to think, “How can we get to what our clients are after? Can we learn things from each other?”

We have what should be weekly, but maybe more like monthly, learning sessions where people will take an hour and take everyone else through something that they’re doing on their platform.

So they’ve learned about something and they want to share that information.

Because we have a mix of specializations, we’re a performance marketing agency, so I sit on the social side.

We have people on the Google side.

Then we’re often working together to find what is the right balance, I suppose, between things.

Especially because a lot of businesses will just think, “Well, Google PPC. That’s the way to do it.”

Whereas actually, depending on their overall goal, there can be a really good mix of different things.

Even within just search or social, there are so many different elements.

When I’m talking to clients, I very much try and go in with an open mind.

Always trying to bring in talking points as opposed to things I’m just saying at them, if that makes sense.

So really trying to get their thoughts on things.

I’m trying to give them recommendations, but having that discussion around stuff.

Something that I really like is we do these six-month deep-dive sessions.

It’s very common, whether you’re client-side or agency-side, to do QBRs, so quarterly business reviews of sorts.

But these six-month meetings are always in person.

They’re a good three- or four-hour session where we do a look back at the last six months and a look forward to the next six months.

We’re working collaboratively on Miro boards together and really trying to work out how to reach that ultimate goal, giving ourselves some midway goals, discussing, and just picking things out that we can try and do together.

Zach:
Miro seems to be a big tool.

It’s just such a great way to collaborate with others and use that kind of whiteboard space, right?

Katt:
Yeah, exactly.

Because it’s something that you can all be in at exactly the same time and just be putting different things, moving things around, connecting things.

It’s great for those kinds of sessions.

I know people use it for more like flowcharts and other things because it’s actually quite a good visualization tool in general.

But yeah, I love using it, to be honest.

Zach:
Are there any major trends that you’ve seen this year?

Any significant shifts within paid social?

Katt:
AI obviously is a huge thing.

I think it’s even more prevalent now, and a lot of companies in particular are working out what they need to do with that.

That is definitely, I wouldn’t call it a trend as such, but something that comes into place.

I think what has come along with that in terms of a sort of theme or trend is brands really wanting and needing to show authenticity because it’s very easy for people to get tricked by something that’s an AI ad or similar.

Brands want to be showing, “We are trustworthy. We have this many reviews. We are real people. These are our values.”

Especially socioeconomically, there’s so much going on.

Over the past few years, that drive for things like sustainability and just really wanting to relate more to the brands that you’re buying from has increased.

You don’t necessarily want to be buying fast fashion.

You want to be buying from a brand that actually cares a bit more about the environment and matches more with your own personal values, I think.

In terms of other trends, video is still huge.

But interestingly, with a lot of my clients, I’m seeing that especially in what we call the lower funnel, when it’s more revenue-driving, video is not working.

People are engaging really well with video when it’s more of that awareness style or they’re learning something from it, but it just isn’t really working much lower down.

It’s something they’re not really engaging with, which I think is slightly different from years gone by.

The other thing is Meta in particular this year has just been trying to make it harder and harder to do my job.

For me, it’s trying to utilize AI to such an extent that it actually makes it difficult to do things more manually.

So in terms of how that fits into a trend, I suppose the platforms are leaning toward trying to do things in such an automated way that it is actually a hindrance to people like me who are just trying to do a job properly, do things more manually, and whatever else.

Which is not a trend I’m a fan of.

Zach:
Are there more specifics around that?

Is it around targeting specifically, or what part of your job is it making difficult now that they’re using that AI on the platform?

Katt:
When you start to even set up a campaign on Meta, for example, it automatically goes to its most AI-focused automatic version.

You have to go through so many hoops to click back and go through to find where the manual settings are.

They’re hiding them under folds even more and more nowadays.

Everything says that the AI version is recommended.

So you have to very specifically say, “No, I don’t want to do this.”

You’ll switch off their enhancements and it’s like, “But why? Are you sure you want to do that?”

And every time I’m like, “Yes.”

There are elements of it where it is really useful, for sure.

But having the choice is the important part, and they’re really trying to remove that choice, it feels like.

Zach:
So you can get around it, but it just takes a little bit of work and more work than you’d like to have to do that.

Katt:
Yeah, exactly.

And someone who’s been in the platform for so many years now, seeing how much it’s changed over time, if you’re out of it for a year, it will have changed completely by the time you come back to it.

You can’t find the settings that you used to know how to use.

Zach:
It’s amazing how quickly it changes.

Are there any platforms or new ad formats that are emerging that you’re excited about?

Katt:
It sounds really silly, but not really.

I think we haven’t had a new introduction of a platform in such a long time.

Even with what I call the death of Twitter, we had things like Mastodon or Bluesky come around, but nothing has propelled itself into that space as much as the previous platforms did, aside from TikTok a few years ago now, obviously.

So there’s nothing in that regard in terms of emerging platforms, I suppose.

I remember around 2023 or so is when we saw quite a lot of new formats and things coming out on platforms like Pinterest, but these days less so.

In terms of platforms, though, I am really excited about trying to get clients onto non-Meta platforms.

I really love the idea of getting some more clients onto Reddit, for example, even just getting some clients onto Pinterest.

I think there’s just a lot we could do there, especially for something like Reddit, where I’m a big Reddit user personally.

Being there contextually, having all of that relevance, being where the conversation is, I think that’s a really exciting opportunity actually.

Zach:
Pinterest, Reddit, and you mentioned TikTok as well.

Are you guys using or recommending TikTok more and more for businesses?

Katt:
Yeah, for the right brands, definitely.

Because it is so video-first, that has to be a huge consideration about it.

Even if they have a certain prestige around their brand or the way that they put together their creative, TikTok does really well when it’s that UGC, or user-generated-content style, filmed on a phone, that kind of thing.

Not all brands really want to go that way.

They want to keep the polished look.

You have to keep up those organic presences as well.

So while we may recommend it a lot of the time, it’s a little bit out of reach, I think, for a lot of companies.

But being everywhere is kind of the necessity now.

Audiences engage so differently when they’re on different platforms.

So you could be trying to reach the exact same people, but the way that they’re consuming content, whether it’s on Pinterest or Instagram or TikTok, they’re in a different mindset when they’re doing it.

So I think there is a need for brands to be kind of everywhere.

It is something that we’re trying to recommend to a lot more clients, even if they don’t think that it was necessarily something for them or they think they’re kind of too old to do it, for example.

Zach:
Something I’ve seen is that brands will put the same content, same type of content, onto multiple social media platforms.

Do you see that as problematic, just given that users have different expectations on those different platforms?

Katt:
Yeah, 100%.

It harks back to when you’d just take your TV spot and stick it on Facebook.

It doesn’t work.

Things have to be, unfortunately, made for the different platforms because they are their own thing.

People are engaging in different ways.

If you take a 60-second YouTube video, you can’t just suddenly stick that on TikTok, for example.

It often needs to be those quick, snappier things.

So making them more specific, even just from a technical perspective, making sure they’re the right formats for it.

Pinterest, for example, works to a two-to-three ratio.

A lot of them are kind of the 9:16 portrait, 1:1.

Even just making sure that those things are correct can show to a user, at least, that a brand has really thought about it and not just repurposed something, essentially.

Zach:
What’s the biggest mistake you see companies or clients making on paid social?

And then how can they fix that?

Katt:
On social specifically, I think there’s quite a big disconnect between their organic and their paid.

People want to see consistency, whether they’re looking at an organic profile, whether they’re being served an ad, whether they’re going to the website.

All of those things should be a consistent journey, consistent messaging from that brand.

That’s something I don’t think as many brands do as they should, to be honest, because again, it goes into that authenticity and trust side of things.

So just having a consistent strategy, a consistent tone of voice, things like that can make a really big difference.

It sounds silly, but budget.

Not every company is going to have a lot of budget, and that’s not a problem, but it’s managing your expectations around that.

So going in with an expectation that you’re going to get 100x on something when you only have 50 quid a month to spend.

It’s making sure that you’re using your budget as wisely as possible, not putting enough behind certain things, spreading it too thin.

All of those sides of it can be a problem in my mind.

If you only have £20 a day to spend versus £1,000 a day to spend that another company has, then don’t split things up so much.

Keep it more refined.

Find what really works.

When you’ve got that money to spend, test things, find what works best so that you can refine it down.

Those are some of the key things.

And as I was saying about the automation side of Meta, just putting everything on Advantage+.

It can work in some regards.

It is not my recommendation ever to only do that.

Especially in brands or companies where they may not have access to a specialist who knows more about this, but they want to do some kind of Facebook marketing, they’ll just trust what Meta is telling them to do.

Usually it’s good to try and find a balance between doing something more manual where you’re inputting targeting for who you’re wanting to reach and then letting the platform do its thing.

So not just leaning wholeheartedly into the Meta recommendation, I think.

Zach:
I know testing and experimentation is big for you guys.

Are there ways that you would recommend businesses do that, where they test that more manual targeting versus letting Meta do the work for them?

Katt:
Yeah.

You can be as simple or as complex about it as you want to be.

The main thing with testing especially is having a hypothesis.

I often find that a lot of people go into testing and don’t really have a hypothesis of what it is.

So, “Video has always worked really well for us in the lower funnel. Let’s challenge that. Let’s do video versus images, for example, to see on specific metrics which does best.”

You can have them just running alongside each other, give them about the same budget, or the platforms do give you nice easy ways to set up A/B tests so that you can give it a very specific section of audience.

Then just make sure you know what metrics you’re looking at as the most important.

You don’t want to come out of a test that you’ve run and find that, “It worked well on this thing, but then the other one worked well on this thing, and now we don’t know.”

You just have to have that decision of, as long as it performs on this thing better than the other, then that’s our decision, I think.

Zach:
We also talked a little bit about AI and authenticity and the need for authenticity in this age of AI now.

Are there ways that you would recommend that businesses integrate AI into their paid social strategy?

That can be agency-side and also client-side.

Katt:
I think there are a few different elements to it because in terms of a paid social strategy, there are a few places where I personally don’t think you should be using AI.

That comes down to things like creative.

Using tools or platforms that allow you to do mass generation of content, for example, that’s not as big of a deal if you’re giving it the elements and it just makes variations thereof.

But especially when you talk about things like authenticity, having an AI image when you’re trying to sell a product, I think it’s just very misleading.

So making sure that you’re not factoring it into strategies in that regard, I think, is really important.

My opinion around how we should be using it as part of a strategy is how we can use it for things like predictive modeling, data analysis, things like that.

Anything that can use the actual machine learning side of it to help understand what is going on in the data or what we think is going to go on when we talk about things like predictive analytics.

One thing I know clients of mine are doing right now is having an actual AI strategy.

Having a consistent way that people across the company are using it.

So it’s not a bit of a Wild West.

There aren’t people afraid to say that they’re using it, and everyone’s using it in a consistent way.

I think it’s really important.

Zach:
That’s interesting.

Having an AI strategy internally and understanding how people are using the tools, and then giving some guidance maybe on what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Are there examples of specific AI tools that you guys are using or recommending to businesses for driving campaign performance?

Katt:
We have a few that we use in terms of things like that creative generation that I mentioned.

There are also tools that can help with creative reporting.

Things like that are really useful.

I know a lot of people in social teams, and some people in our social team, who use it when writing copy.

I think there’s a lot of discussion in general these days about knowing if something is AI copy.

So it’s important that you’re using it to support what you’re doing as opposed to letting it do it for you.

Putting in guidelines, some examples, and letting it give you some thoughts so that it assists with writing copy, for example.

It can give you some extra ideas that you may not have thought of, or just give you different kinds of wording that could be helpful that you might just not think of at the time.

In our experimentation team specifically, they use ChatGPT Pro, which I think is the safer version where it doesn’t share the data around or use it for the learning.

They use that for a lot of data analysis.

So taking thousands and thousands of lines of data and having it pull out some of the key themes, key points, things like that, so that we can actually take a more manageable amount of data and do our proper analysis on it.

Zach:
It seems like striking this balance between the use of AI and authenticity can be quite challenging.

Particularly, there are so many new tools coming out all the time, and it’s exciting to think about what they’re capable of.

But striking that balance with authenticity seems like a challenge.

Do you have any thoughts on what brands ought to be doing?

You touched on it a little bit with not using it for creative, but do you have any other thoughts on how they can balance the use of these tools and authenticity?

Katt:
I think the main thing is AI was kind of designed to assist everything, not do it for us.

So in my mind, AI should be there to support doing some of those crappy, mundane tasks and assisting in those things to allow people to have the time to be creative or to do the aspects of their job properly.

There’s lots that can be done in terms of things like image generative AI, but there are things that can be done just in terms of meetings and meeting notes.

Using AI tools in those ways is a much more efficient way to do it and isn’t damaging to your brand versus potentially running something where people are going to say, “That doesn’t look right. I don’t trust you anymore.”

Zach:
I want to ask you, based on your experience and your career so far, just talking to people who may be students or maybe people wanting to get into marketing or agency land.

What are some of the first roles that they should be looking for, or some of the skills that they should be trying to build and acquire themselves?

Katt:
First jobs, anything.

It sounds really silly, but it’s mostly about getting your foot in the door.

As I said earlier, I have a photography degree.

I didn’t study marketing at all, but I had a personal interest in social media from a young age.

I had a YouTube profile when I was like 12, and I always loved that.

I always had it as kind of a thing along the side.

I knew that photography wasn’t going to be my career.

I wasn’t up for doing freelancing and having the instability of it.

So it was about those transferable skills as the main thing.

Can I manage multiple projects at the same time?

My time management is important.

That sort of thing is what matters.

Having computer literacy is a really important one.

Especially for marketing, things like Excel literacy.

A lot of people don’t really know how to use it, and there are a lot of really simple courses online that can teach you the basics that you can learn more as you go.

Some of the key skills that I look out for, especially for people, are that keen eye for detail, collaborating, wanting to be a team player, really being willing to do stuff, and having that tenacious attitude around stuff.

Not having the complacency of, “Something isn’t working and it’s not my problem.”

It’s, “No, I want to find out what’s wrong so I can fix it.”

That kind of thing.

And as I said, time management.

Especially when you come to agency life, time management is really important because you’re having to wear lots of different hats, lots of different points, trying to juggle things all at once.

Something that you learn as you go, but that I think is important to take from the beginning, is trying to think of the wider marketing landscape.

Don’t just think of it from the discipline that you are trying to get into.

You want to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer themselves.

If you’re trying to do something, but you as a person would respond badly to it, then why are you running it?

Always put yourself in those shoes.

But especially in that early stage, just try and get your foot in the door.

Apply for hundreds of jobs if you need to.

And also, don’t wait around.

I had my first job like two weeks after I stopped my classes at university.

I applied for I think like 150 jobs or something.

I got three interviews, but got the job from one of them.

I was only there for about three months, but then it meant that when it came to October and I wanted to get a new job because that one wasn’t very good, I had three months’ experience against everyone else who’d taken the summer off.

So I got that job.

That’s when I went into my first agency, and I was there for two and a half years.

Little things like that, if you really have the drive to do it, just taking that initiative to try and take a step forward where you can, really.

Zach:
That is a lot of job applications to put out there.

Were you tweaking each one for each role and each company you were applying for?

Katt:
To an extent.

I would have versions that were for slightly different job types, especially not knowing exactly what I wanted to go into.

I knew I wanted to do media, but I didn’t know exactly what that meant yet.

I obviously had no idea that doing paid social was even a possibility because I just didn’t know it existed really.

So I would tweak them basically.

Was it slightly more salesy, like on a partner side?

Was it more traditional marketing?

Was it digital marketing?

So I’d have slightly different versions, but I was definitely not tweaking for every single one.

Zach:
Yeah, because that’s a lot.

And it’s great that you got the role.

Three interviews, and you got a role out of that.

That’s fantastic.

You mentioned an Excel course, like taking a course online in Excel.

How important are certifications versus hands-on experience?

Katt:
I think early on, hands-on experience is the key thing.

Often I find that if people just try and do the certifications as they’re learning, they just don’t have the actual context around them to really build it into something else.

I remember in my first job, I had a colleague who started fresh and she was trying to do the Meta Blueprint at the time.

She failed it three times because she just didn’t have the hands-on experience to really build out the rest of the knowledge around it.

So I think any of those sorts of certifications are useful to do alongside doing your hands-on experience because that’s where you really get it.

When I moved to eBay, I was the youngest in the team by, I think, like five years because my first role was so kind of trial by fire.

I learned everything so quickly that I was then at a much higher point and was able to move on to a better role from that.

Really, the hands-on experience is key.

But then doing those certifications can give a level of confidence to yourself, I think, but also confidence to businesses that you’re applying to.

If you are in a company and clients you’re working with see that you’re certified, that just adds that little bit of extra something, which I think is really good.

I think as well, just taking courses, even if you don’t intend to finish them, is a good thing.

There are loads of free courses online which will teach you lots of different pieces that can just give you a bit more of that information that you maybe wouldn’t know how to find otherwise, or may just not even crop up in your day-to-day job as well.

Zach:
For these folks who are aspiring marketers looking to get into a career in marketing, again, students or other professionals looking to move to marketing, would you recommend internships, side hustles, side projects, portfolio work?

What might that look like?

Katt:
I love calling them side hustles. That makes it sound so funny.

But as I was saying before, it’s anything to get your foot in the door.

Even while I was at uni, I was doing little random freelance jobs for things.

I was working with people on little YouTube projects.

I was helping set up merch stores.

I was running social media accounts for friends who had YouTube channels, things like that.

Any little thing you can do, because it also helps you stand out.

So when you’re looking at your CV or your resume, having those little projects that you can mention is something that shows that you’re slightly different and you’ve been taking that initiative to do something toward what you eventually want to do.

If you can afford to do an internship, absolutely.

It’s obviously a tricky thing, especially with unpaid internships, that those aren’t available for everyone.

But it’s just trying to find any opportunity you can, putting yourself out there.

Put yourself on Fiverr or something if you need to, to just try and get those little things that build up to that bigger picture.

Zach:
Apart from those kinds of projects and using those, are there other ways that people can make themselves stand out in interviews or in the application process?

Katt:
The application process, I think, is trickier because the best way to wow a potential employer is in that interview.

You’re going to be applying for hundreds of jobs.

That’s just the job market right now, unfortunately.

But I would say make sure that your CV or your resume really highlights things that make you stand out.

As I was saying, mine has a little blurb about me, but it specifically calls out skills.

It calls out selected projects.

Anything that is slightly different to someone else, I make sure that any of my experiences actually bullet point what I did in those roles very clearly that is relevant to a next role.

When I didn’t have those experiences, I called out the skills very clearly and what they give me to get that job in the first place.

I personally think that a CV or resume doesn’t need to be fancy.

I have managed to get where I am in my career with one that has been made in Word, using Arial, black and white, and has nothing to it.

Trying to do a big fancy one on Canva is just unnecessary.

It’s all about really the words that are on it and them speaking to the person.

So make sure you’re using buzzwords.

As I say, make sure you’re highlighting those skills and projects and other things that are going to make you stand out a bit more.

Then when you get to the interview, just be yourself.

Be comfortable as best you can.

Ask questions.

The main thing is always trying to ask them questions that can have them envisioning you in the role.

Who am I going to be working with?

Who would I be reporting to?

What’s a normal day going to look like for me?

What’s the onboarding process going to look like?

All those sorts of things that get them into that mindset that you might be the right person, I think, are important.

Zach:
Just kind of back to resumes and CVs.

One of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve looked at students’ or friends’ resumes when they’ve asked me to look at theirs is often people focus on the tasks that they did in that role rather than focus on the outcome that that brought to their job or brought to the company.

Would you agree with that?

When you’re looking to hire to your team, are you looking for what has this person achieved rather than what do they do on a daily basis?

Katt:
Yeah, I think so.

There’s an element of needing to know that they can do the tasks, obviously, and have the skills around that.

It’s not to say that you have to have increased revenue by X percent or whatever to be even considered.

But it’s more showing that you have been part of bigger projects that allowed you to do those sorts of things, that you have that kind of inquisitive mindset.

Things like that are what’s important.

Something as well for the interview process that I forgot to mention, in terms of making yourself stand out, is really going the extra mile.

I’m still quite proud of this.

For my interview, I actually went onto their website, did the inspect site, found all of their fonts, all of the hex codes for their colors, and picked out different elements from the website, like their logos and other things.

So the presentation that I had to do to them was essentially branded.

Apparently, that really looked good for me.

Even though you might not think about some of those things, think ahead.

Do your research.

If you can do those little nods, I think that is actually something that can look really good because they know that you’ve taken the time to think about it and really try and make yourself stand out.

Zach:
That’s great advice.

That is going the extra mile, isn’t it?

Just going to their website and pulling the font from the code.

That’s a great idea.

That’s so smart.

Katt:
I know.

It was quite extra.

Zach:
Looking back on your career, what do you wish you knew when you started?

Katt:
I wish I’d known, I guess, the breadth of it.

As I said earlier, I knew I wanted to get into media, but I didn’t know what that meant.

I think knowing the types of roles available and what they really mean is something that isn’t necessarily readily available, or at least it wasn’t when I started my career.

Especially knowing that I wanted to do social media as well, I didn’t know what my options were.

If you say you want to work in social media, that could go into being a community manager.

You could be posting things organically, being a brand manager.

You could be doing what I do in terms of paid social.

You could be working at Facebook.

There are lots of different ways that go into that.

I think knowing just some of the options that you have, I suppose, is a really key thing that was lacking before that I hope would be more available now.

Because there are so many different types of roles that fit different people.

If you’re more into the weeds, data-driven, whatever else, there are roles for you.

If you don’t want to be so in the platforms, but you want to be working on strategy and other things, there are roles for you.

The breadth of it is huge.

I wish I’d known that early on to know what path I was going on.

Zach:
Do you have any thoughts on how someone might get that knowledge before they move into a marketing role?

How could they go figure that out?

Katt:
I think just speaking to people as best you can.

Looking through LinkedIn at different job titles and seeing what’s there, seeing what the job descriptions say.

If you wanted to, even ask ChatGPT, “What does this job title do?”

Anything like that, just try and get a bit of an understanding.

And I was going to say from this, if any of your students or whoever want to reach out to me and ask me about stuff, I’m more than happy for people to do that.

Because it can be tricky to navigate coming into it.

But it’s a lot of research and just trying to work out what each of these different things means.

Trying to get an understanding, I think, of the different types of marketing, even from an initial standpoint, is quite important.

Do you want to be doing print?

Do you want to be doing digital out of home?

Do you want to be working on Google, doing search campaigns?

There are so many elements to it.

It is hard to get your head around, but there is stuff out there about the types of parts of media that you could go into.

Zach:
That’s helpful from the knowledge side of things, like what knowledge do you wish you had had?

But are there specific skills that you wish you had acquired before you got into marketing that you’d go back and do now?

Katt:
Yeah.

A lot of them are people skills, to be honest, and especially things around my own confidence.

Until I got to a certain point in my career, I really lacked the confidence in it.

As I’ve gotten further and further through, I have that confidence of, “I do know what I’m doing, actually.”

The imposter syndrome has been swept away for another few years.

But those people management skills.

When I say people management, I don’t mean managing a team.

Actually just working with people effectively.

There’s a lot around things like managing up, knowing how to manage bad managers.

Things like that are really tricky skills to learn, but they’re really important.

I kind of wish I knew how to stand up for myself, to be honest.

I looked quite young, or maybe not so much anymore.

But for the longest time, I did look very young, and so I was treated quite junior even though I was technically the specialist in the room.

There’s a lot around how to manage yourself and others in those sorts of situations to really show that you do know what you’re talking about.

You know your stuff.

And being able to positively manage conflict, either with clients, people internally, whatever, to have more productive conversations even if you disagree with something.

Zach:
Those are some tough things.

What’s one way, or a tactic maybe, that you’ve used in that environment where you’re younger or appear to be younger?

What’s a tactic that you use in that environment to demonstrate that you’re the specialist in the room?

Katt:
I always just use the data that I have and I try and speak with confidence as best I can.

You can try and give opinions on things and sometimes people won’t respect them, but people have to respect data ultimately.

So the more backup that you have in that is good.

And honestly, something that I had early on in my career was having good managers who let me speak for myself, who didn’t take my recognition.

They would try and highlight the things that I was doing and highlight when the work was mine as opposed to theirs, even if we were presenting it together.

But it is a tough one.

So just really trying to go into it with that, “I can do this, I know, and I’m going to challenge some of those perceptions that you have or things that you say.”

That’s really part of it.

But I appreciate that’s hard.

Zach:
All right.

Some quick-fire questions here to wrap up.

If you weren’t doing paid social, what would you be doing?

Katt:
I would really like to be working with dogs, to be honest.

I have a greyhound. I love her.

I’d like to have a greyhound daycare or rehoming center or something, completely away from marketing basically.

Zach:
Yeah, cool.

A greyhound rescue.

Nice. Very cool.

Katt:
Yeah, exactly.

Zach:
What’s your favorite campaign from this year?

It doesn’t have to be something that you’ve worked on, but just across the board, a campaign that you’ve seen.

Katt:
I feel like I don’t consume enough outside of what my clients are doing because also my social media feeds and other things are just filled with my own clients.

So I don’t really know actually in terms of separately to what I do.

But a client of mine, Jigsaw, which is a fashion brand in the UK, did this gorgeous early summer campaign called Sola.

It was all shot on location.

You know when you just look at creative and you’re like, “Yeah.”

It was one of those.

Loved it.

Zach:
Very cool.

What are some of the must-have tools or apps in your daily toolkit?

Katt:
I talked about Miro boards.

I think that’s a really important one, especially if you’re working collaboratively.

Microsoft Loop is also a really good thing.

It’s kind of similar where it’s basically just a live sheet that you can all type on at the same time, kind of like a Google Doc or similar.

I really like using Copilot during meetings, where it essentially transcribes it for you and then summarizes points based on the conversation.

So I’ll often use that alongside making my own notes.

Then when I send a call follow-up to a client, I’ll pick through both, pull out the key things, and then pull out the follow-ups.

But it can mean that you are more actively engaged in the conversation, as opposed to worrying about making sure you get everything down, which is super helpful.

The only other thing is an actual notepad.

It sounds really silly, but I really like actually just being able to write things down.

It makes them feel more real in my head if I’ve actually written it down on a piece of paper.

Zach:
So Copilot is providing you a transcript of the whole meeting.

And then I think I’ve seen that you can kind of query it and ask it questions, right?

You could ask it for your action items from that meeting.

Does that sound right?

Katt:
Exactly.

It does a summary, follow-ups, and action points.

It’s an incredibly helpful tool to be keeping on top of your meetings and the outcomes and the key points without you needing to be distracted and writing things down at the same time.

I think that’s actually super helpful.

It’s one of my favorite things that I’ve started using in the last year or so.

Zach:
I think I’m going to have to start using that.

It sounds like a great one.

Katt:
Yes, honestly, it’s really good.

There are lots of other tools.

That’s just the Microsoft one.

But those tools are a lifesaver.

Zach:
Nice.

Last question is, where can people find out more about you and your work?

Katt:
I guess you can find me on LinkedIn.

I’m just Katt Wade on LinkedIn.

I post on there very occasionally, but if you wanted to message me on there, feel free.

I don’t have a professional website or anything.

My Twitter hasn’t been updated in a long time.

So LinkedIn is probably fine.

Zach:
Great.

Katt, thank you so much for doing this interview.

I really appreciate it.

I know my students are going to get a lot out of it.

I’m sure other people will be too.

So thank you so much.

Really good talking to you.

Katt:
Yeah, I appreciate you having me on.

It was awesome.