Patrick Gilbert

Patrick joined AdVenture Media in 2015 as a digital strategist, after studying marketing and economics at Penn State and a first job as a marketing analyst on Wall Street. He became chief operating officer and, in January 2024, CEO.

His subject for a decade has been what happens to advertising when machines take over the bidding. In 2016 he argued that manual bidding beat Google's automation. Within two years he had changed his mind in public, in a post titled Join or Die: Time to Embrace Google Automation. It traveled inside Google, and Google invited him to speak to its Premier Partner agencies, including a keynote at its Premier Partner Awards in Dublin. In 2022 he appeared in Google's own video series on how automation is changing agency work.

He turned that argument into a book. Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the Age of Automation came out in 2020 with a foreword by David Sable, former global CEO of Young & Rubicam. His second book, Never Always, Never Never: Strategic Marketing in an AI World, followed in May 2026. Each of its 33 chapters links to an AI agent trained on the book, and he narrated the audiobook himself.

PPC Hero named him to its Top 50 Most Influential PPC Experts in 2020 and its Top 25 in 2021.

Inside AdVenture he has rebuilt a working agency around AI, down to requiring every employee to be proficient in Claude Code. He teaches what came out of that in The AI-First Leader workshop, which draws on the closing chapters of Never Always, Never Never, and co-teaches Claude Cowork for Beginners.