Paid Media Hiring in the UK: How the Landscape Is Evolving as We Head Into 2026
The Paid Media Job Market Hasn’t Disappeared — It Has Evolved
Over the past year or so, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people across the paid media world in the UK – candidates, hiring managers, agency leaders and performance teams. The same theme keeps surfacing again and again: the roles are still there, but the expectations around them have changed.
The paid media market hasn’t disappeared. Demand is still strong, and plenty of businesses continue to invest in growth. What has shifted, however, is the kind of talent organisations are looking to hire as we move toward 2026. The days of teams built largely around single-channel specialists are fading. Instead, companies increasingly want people who can operate across paid media, measurement, creative testing and commercial performance, people who influence revenue rather than simply optimise campaigns. And that shift has fundamentally changed how hiring decisions are being made.
The market today feels leaner, but also more mature. A few years ago, many roles centred on “hands-on-keyboard” execution inside Google or Meta. Those roles still exist, but they’re no longer the core of most teams. The structures I see now tend to be smaller, more senior and far more commercially accountable. The conversation has moved away from “we need someone who knows the platforms” and toward “we need someone who can help us understand whether this spend is actually profitable.”
How Automation Is Reshaping Paid Media Roles and Skill Sets
It’s less about covering a checklist of channels and more about whether a person can explain what’s really driving growth, connect creative and data in a meaningful way, and challenge numbers when they don’t look right. That’s where the value now sits.
Automation has played a big part in that shift. With Performance Max, Advantage+ and similar automated systems doing much of the mechanical optimisation, a lot of the traditional manual work simply isn’t there anymore. As a result, the nature of the role has changed. It’s no longer about who can restructure an account the fastest; it’s about who understands what the platform is optimising toward and whether that aligns with the wider goals of the business.
The people who thrive in this environment are usually those who are comfortable questioning platform-reported results, designing sensible experiments, thinking in terms of incrementality rather than just CPA, and knowing when not to blindly trust the data in front of them. The job has become less about fighting automation and more about steering it in the right direction.
Why Commercial Thinking Now Defines the Strongest Paid Media Hires
Another noticeable shift is how closely paid media now sits alongside creative, CRM and analytics. In many organisations, the role is no longer a standalone performance function but part of a broader growth and experimentation ecosystem. The strongest hires tend to be people who can brief creative clearly, talk confidently about CAC, margin and lifetime value, pull their own insight from GA4 or Looker, and link campaign performance back to meaningful business outcomes.
It is no longer enough to say that performance improved because CPA dropped. Stakeholders want to know whether those customers retained, whether margin was compromised to acquire them and whether revenue actually grew as a result. These are the kinds of conversations that are becoming far more common, particularly in more mature or data-driven organisations.
There is also a noticeable difference between how in-house teams and agencies are hiring. On the in-house side, most roles now come with clear ownership — titles such as Paid Media Lead, Performance Marketing Manager or Head of Growth, where there is a defined number to deliver and genuine involvement in strategy. Agencies, meanwhile, are evolving in a slightly different direction. Execution remains important, but clients are increasingly looking for strategic partnership, cross-channel perspective and support around creative testing and experimentation. As a result, agencies are hiring people who can add consultative value rather than simply deliver campaign management.
The people who stand out most in this new landscape aren’t the ones listing every platform and tool on their CV. They are the ones who can explain what they tested, what they learned and what changed in the business because of it. Instead of simply stating that CPA improved, they talk about the type of customers they acquired, whether those customers were higher quality and what that meant over the longer term. Curiosity and critical thinking count for a lot. Being able to say “this number improved — but here’s why I’m still cautious about it” is often more compelling than a neat performance win with no context behind it.
Overall, the paid media hiring landscape in the UK heading into 2026 feels more strategic, more commercially focused and far more connected to creative and data functions. Automation hasn’t removed the need for strong people; it has simply raised the bar for what “strong” now looks like. The individuals who seem to thrive are those who think beyond the ad account, understand the financial reality behind growth, work closely with other teams and aren’t afraid to challenge the data when it doesn’t fully stack up.
Because at this stage, paid media isn’t really about pushing buttons anymore. It’s about understanding, and owning, the story behind the results.
