Undercover: The Secret Life of a Google Ad Rep

We’ve all had the phone call — “Hi, it’s your Google ad rep, and I saw some things in your account I think you can improve. We should get on a call and I can help!”

You only have to be on one of those calls to realize they’re not consultants, they’re salespeople. And their advice will probably be less about your specific account, and more about having you spend more, or blindly accept the platform’s AI-based recommendations.

It’s not just Google, of course. DTC marketer Barry Hott last week posted this on LinkedIn:

Some questions those reps won’t answer are things like how many other accounts are you managing? Where are you located? Are you paid an incentive if I increase my spend?

Well now, we know some of those answers — at least, those for reps hired by one company Google subcontracts this work to: Teleperformance. The very name sounds like sales call centre from the 80s.

Freelance ad consultant Boris Beceric also wondered about this, so he decided to apply for a job there. Not for the job, but for information. And earlier today he told me they were pretty uninterested in his experience with…