How to Build a T-Shaped Career in Advertising (That Scales With AI)

There’s a pattern I’ve seen in people whose careers scale well — especially in industries like advertising, where tools change constantly and buzzwords come and go.

They tend to have what’s called a T-shaped skillset. One deep vertical — something they genuinely understand at a systems level — and a horizontal spread of lateral skills that make them versatile, valuable, and hard to replace.

Let’s break down what that looks like today, and how to build one in the age of AI.

What Does “T-Shaped” Actually Mean?

It’s not a new idea, but it's more relevant than ever.

• The vertical part of the T is your depth. This is where you go deep — programmatic media buying, SEO, email lifecycle marketing, performance creative, whatever it is. You don’t just “know” this thing. You understand its mechanics, incentives, tools, and how it drives business value.

  
  

• The horizontal part is your range. This is where you’re competent across a variety of adjacent skills — things that enhance or amplify your depth. In 2025, those are things like LLMs, data analysis, creative storytelling, or product thinking.

People who get stuck in mid-career often do so because they stayed too narrow. People who remain generalists struggle to differentiate.

A T-shaped profile avoids both traps.

Step 1: Pick Your Spike

Your vertical should be something that:

1. You actually find interesting (because you’ll need to spend time with it), and

2. Has commercial value and technical depth (so you don’t get easily replaced).

In my case, it was Programmatic Advertising. It was complex, underappreciated, and sat at the intersection of tech and marketing. That gave me leverage.

But your spike could be CRM workflows. Paid social strategy. Conversion rate optimization. Just don’t confuse tools with depth — knowing how to use Meta Ads is not a spike. Understanding how attribution affects creative strategy across the funnel? That’s closer.

The test is: Could you teach this to someone else — and could they actually run with it after?

Step 2: Layer In Lateral Skills That Scale

Once you’ve got depth, the next move is to broaden just enough. But deliberately. You’re not trying to “learn everything.” You’re trying to build range that makes your core skill more useful.

Here are three areas I’d focus on today:

1. LLMs and Prompting

Not just “using ChatGPT.” I mean knowing how to structure prompts, analyze outputs, and integrate tools like GPT or Claude into workflows — whether that’s creative testing, audience research, or insight generation.

2. Analytics and Data Storytelling

You don’t need to build dashboards, but you do need to know how to read them. Know what metrics matter, how to debug weird numbers, and how to translate data into decisions. Google Analytics, Looker Studio, even SQL at a basic level — these go a long way.

3. Narrative Thinking

The ability to tie together ideas into a coherent story is underrated. You’re often not pitching a media plan — you’re pitching a point of view. If you can shape insight into narrative, you become more persuasive, more strategic, and more trusted.

Why This Matters More With AI

A lot of tasks will get automated. Campaign setups, A/B tests, basic analysis, even copywriting.

What won’t get replaced as easily is judgment.

The ability to connect dots between what the data says and what a business should do.

The ability to brief a team well, or know what lever to pull when results dip.

T-shaped professionals are integrators. They sit across systems. They understand enough of each moving part to be valuable even when one part becomes commoditized.

If you’re early in your career, start with depth. Learn one thing well. Then layer in the horizontal.

If you’re mid-career and feel stuck, ask whether you’re too specialized — or whether you’ve stayed surface-level across too many things.

And if you’re hiring — don’t just look for tool fluency. Look for people with a core spike and the curiosity to keep learning across domains. That’s who scales.