I wouldn't knock tools like Marin/kenshoo too bad. They really do help you scale if you're taking spend way past $6m.
The target market there is different though. Think instead of a single company spending $6m on their ads, more like an agency spending $60m++ on 10++ different companies' ads.
Major props to this guy for doing so well in house though.
I worked for Marin as a software engineer very early on and I'm actually still a shareholder (looking forward to it going to zero so I can declare full loss on my taxes). Their technology stack is tragic. That PA acquisition? They lost $1.1m on it. The company has never been profitable and the execs get paid a lot, yet do very little. I wouldn't give them a dime.
Have used both and had relationships with both companies. They can help fill a need, particularly if managing across Google and Bing and social. However in my experience, they lagged behind on access to the latest features, and there's an open debate on how effective their bid strategies can really be vs. Google when they cannot make auction-level decisions like Google can. The flip-side to that argument is that for some advertisers, they may not have their conversion data in Google, or may have other bid considerations factoring in that can be better handled with an external bid platform.
Ultimately, this needs to be worth the price though when their fees are measured in % of media.
The target market there is different though. Think instead of a single company spending $6m on their ads, more like an agency spending $60m++ on 10++ different companies' ads.
Major props to this guy for doing so well in house though.