After five years helping drive commercial and digital transformation at ITV, Jay Rajdev has joined AI-powered media planning business TAU as MD London. Formerly Controller of Advanced Advertising at ITV, Rajdev played a central role in the broadcaster’s addressable advertising evolution and became one of the UK industry’s most recognised voices on media innovation.
Speaking to New Digital Age, he discusses why he made the move, how AI is reshaping media planning, and why the future agency model will depend more than ever on human intelligence.
Why make the move from ITV to a startup environment?
For me, the excitement comes from reuniting with great people I’ve worked with in the past. There’s definitely a bit of getting the band back together about it.
At the same time, we’re at a moment with AI where the industry is genuinely starting to realise the difference it can make to marketing and media planning. The capability and processing power of the models is now exceptional, and our understanding of how to apply them is improving really quickly.
I’m also quite restless as a person. I enjoy moving fast and being part of a growth story. That opportunity to actively help build something at pace again was really appealing.
What convinced you this was the right moment to make the jump?
Media has become incredibly complex. When I was planning and buying media more than 20 years ago, there were maybe half a dozen options within each channel. TV was still relatively concentrated, print was huge, and radio was comparatively straightforward.
Today there are dozens of media channels and multiple ways of buying every single one of them. Even YouTube alone has numerous buying approaches and endless targeting and audience permutations.
The process of taking a brief, applying agency insight, mining all the available data and generating a meaningful media recommendation has become hugely unwieldy. Unless you throw enormous resource at it, it’s almost impossible to do comprehensively.
That’s where AI becomes transformative. When you combine the processing power of AI models with experienced media expertise, you can start building genuinely gamechanging tools. You can analyse entire markets in minutes rather than days and remove massive amounts of complexity from the planning process.
How much has complexity damaged the craft of media planning?
I think the craft of media planning has been overwhelmed by complexity. Agencies now have specialist teams for every platform and discipline, paid social, paid search, programmatic, TikTok and so on. Even understanding the ecosystem has become difficult.
That’s partly why so many clients say their media plans all look the same. The planning process naturally starts reverting to the mean because people are overwhelmed by operational complexity.
The real craft of planning is finding points of difference. It’s finding the gold in the insight.
If AI can automate a lot of the processing, mining and summarising work, planners can spend more time being curious again. They can spend more time with clients, with consumers, on factory floors, understanding businesses and uncovering richer perspectives.
That’s where the real value lies.
So AI actually enhances human creativity rather than replacing it?
Absolutely. We don’t need fewer planners. We need planners doing different things.
The role evolves into curating better inputs, understanding what intelligence should go into models, learning how to prompt effectively, interrogating outputs and identifying where the real value sits.
Prompt engineering becomes an important skill. So does challenging the AI and interrogating it for brilliance rather than simply accepting outputs at face value.
The tools we’re developing produce incredibly sophisticated outputs at pace, but the human role becomes even more important in shaping and refining those outputs.
That’s what excites me most. AI allows planners to spend more time doing the parts of the job they actually love.
What does that mean for the future agency model?
I don’t think the future should be about agencies simply trying to do more with less. Too much of the AI conversation has become tied to cost cutting.
We’ve seen major technology companies and holding groups reduce headcount while citing AI, but often that’s really about business rationalisation rather than genuine transformation.
The opportunity is much bigger than that.
Planning will remain at the heart of agencies, but the planning function itself will fundamentally evolve. What AI gives brands and agencies is access to unprecedented planning capability.
We’re also moving towards agentic activation and agent-to-agent buying, where systems can increasingly automate elements of execution. But the really interesting area for me is planning intelligence, bringing together outcomes data, audience insight and multiple datasets to create dramatically better planning recommendations.
That’s where the real opportunity sits.
There’s a lot of AI marketing hype right now. How mature is the market really?
I actually still think we’re in the early stages. We’ve moved beyond AI simply being a novelty, but we’re nowhere near maturity.
The models themselves are now table stakes because everyone has access to them. The challenge is making sense of that power in ways that genuinely improve outcomes for advertisers and agencies.
That’s the next phase of the market.
What’s interesting is that many brands already see this work as a competitive advantage. We’re working with a number of major clients, but many don’t yet want that work publicised because they believe what they’re building gives them an edge in their market.
To me, that’s a sign of how early we still are.
What makes TAU different from the growing number of AI-focused businesses entering the market?
I’d actually challenge the idea that it’s a crowded market. There are a lot of consultants helping companies think about AI strategy or build custom solutions, but what we’re building is different.
We’re evolving into a hybrid of consulting and productised solutions. We’re codifying tools and approaches that can enhance agency and in-house planning teams in meaningful ways.
The other major differentiator is the people. The level of expertise in the business is extraordinary. There are genuine programmatic and digital specialists in the room, people who deeply understand the complexity modern marketers are dealing with.
That combination of deep media planning expertise and advanced AI capability is what makes this moment so exciting.
