A recent study found that AI tools can help make some workers more productive, albeit at the expense of their happiness. Somebody should warn Tom Newhouse.
The GOP media buyer, whose resume includes stints at Targeted Victory, the NRCC and Convergence Media, recently hung his own shingle. One thing he’s aiming for with the new shop: creating great efficiencies for clients using AI tools.
“What I’m seeing in the industry is that more people can do more with less — using AI and the ability to become more efficient with our jobs allowed me to look at digital for the first time as something that can be done with a smaller, leaner staff as opposed to having to bulk up and compete with firms that have dozens upon dozens of staffers,” Newhouse told C&E.
He sees himself carving a new lane thanks to the efficiencies created by the automation of media planning and buying, allowing him to focus on strategy and “creative solutions” for clients — hence the firm name: Slash Strategy. It’s a novel approach in more ways than just the embrace of technology.
Simply put: it’s hard to bill for strategic advice, but Newhouse sees a greater need for that type of hands-on consulting in an era where the industry is increasingly dominated by mega firms. “It’s not just looking at numbers and understanding, ‘Okay, X dollars here, Y dollars there.’ It’s strategically [determining] how do we break through?
“It’s now a reach game — whoever can reach the most voters is going to win. But that takes outside-the-box strategies. And so allowing for some of [the] media strategy and budgets to be a little bit more standardized and then allowing me to flex my muscles when it comes to developing creative solutions for these complex problems is something that I particularly enjoy.”
One-stop-shops are increasingly common on the right, where the trend in recent cycles has been toward, well, bigger being better. But that can leave clients feeling shortchanged when, say, a partner brings in their business but a junior staffer is the one managing the account day-to-day.
“I think one of the big lessons I learned is that bigger is not always better,” said Newhouse of his career. “In fact, when you have smaller overhead, it allows you to be more flexible in terms of adapting to different types of projects as opposed to being a big box shop that tries to do everything for everyone.”
He added: “Being smaller means that we are more flexible, more agile, and it also allows us to really choose what we want to spend our time on versus what we want to bring partners in to spend their time on.”
