Every conference schedule has one block where the tracks fight each other for your attention. At Hero Conf San Diego this September, that block is Track 2, September 15, 1:55 PM — “Paid Media Efficiency.” Three sessions, three angles on the question that decides whether a paid media program compounds or stalls: are you spending effort on the things that actually move performance?
Two of those sessions come from practitioners whose work we’ve followed and respected for years. The third one is ours. Here’s why we think all three belong on your schedule — starting with the headliners.
Hero Conf Track 2 · September 15, 2026 · 1:55 PM
Brooke Osmundson · Director of Growth Marketing at Smith Micro Software
Which PPC tactics actively hurt low-budget accounts today, why they break down in modern auction environments, and what to replace them with. Built for practitioners and marketing managers running under ~$10k/month in lead gen or e-commerce.
If you’ve read PPC content anywhere in the last decade, you’ve read Brooke Osmundson. She’s one of the most consistently practical voices in the industry, and this talk takes on something almost nobody says out loud: most “best practices” were written for accounts with data to burn. Under $10k a month, the standard playbook — more segmentation, more campaign types, more tactics — spreads data too thin, slows learning, and makes performance more volatile, not less.
Her session promises a framework for deciding what to keep, what to remove, and where small budgets actually perform best. We manage accounts at both ends of the spend spectrum, and we’d put it this way: the discipline of protecting signal quality when data is scarce is the same discipline that makes big accounts efficient. Small-budget operators just can’t afford to skip it. If that’s your world, this is your session.
Hero Conf Track 2 · September 15, 2026 · 1:55 PM
Breanne Bartlett · Associate Director of Paid Search at Go Fish Digital
How optimizing toward the wrong metric creates outcomes that look great in-platform while falling short of actual business objectives — and how to identify misaligned success metrics, improve signal quality, and point the platforms at true business success.
Breanne Bartlett’s premise is the one every experienced buyer eventually learns the hard way: the platforms are phenomenal at hitting the target you give them — including the wrong one. Feed Smart Bidding a soft conversion and it will find you an endless supply of people who fill out forms and never buy. The dashboard will look spectacular the whole time.
Her session uses real-world examples to show how to spot misaligned success metrics and re-aim the machine at outcomes the business actually cares about. It pairs beautifully with Brooke’s talk — one is about not fragmenting your signal, the other is about making sure the signal points somewhere worth going. Together they’re a complete argument about what “optimization” should mean in 2026.
Hero Conf Track 2 · September 15, 2026 · 1:55 PM
John M. Williams · Director of Customer Acquisition at Silver Mirror · Founder, AHMEEGO
Building paid media tools live on stage — the kind you’ve been duct-taping together in spreadsheets — using MCP servers, lightweight AI agents, and Google Ads Scripts. Attendees leave with a framework for spotting tool gaps and starter code patterns they can deploy the same week.
Our session is the practical footnote to what Brooke and Breanne will argue. If fewer, better tactics win, and if the metrics you optimize for decide everything — then the natural next question is: where are the tools that let a practitioner actually operate that way? Mostly, they don’t exist. The platforms give you their interface; the work demands something else; and the gap gets filled with spreadsheets held together by hope.
So instead of talking about closing that gap, we’re going to close it on stage. Live builds, real APIs, real consequences — MCP servers, lightweight AI agents, and Google Ads Scripts, assembled in front of the room. The point isn’t the demo. The point is the proof: “I’ll just build it myself” is no longer reserved for engineers.
The credibility behind that promise is Buddy — the AI Google Ads agent we built with exactly this stack and shipped as a real product: live on the web, live on Google Play, and in App Store review. This is what the “build it yourself” path produces when you follow it all the way:
Buddy in 26 seconds — audits, wasted spend, creative validation
The full product flow — sign-in, credits, and subscription, end to end
Everything in those videos runs on the patterns we’ll build from scratch in San Diego: a Cloudflare Workers backend, an orchestrator loop with 28 Google Ads API actions, and the preview-confirm-execute-receipt guardrails that make an agent safe to point at real money. The full build-in-public story lives at itallstartedwithaidea.com, the launch details are in last week’s announcement, and you can use Buddy in your browser right now to see what the output of this approach feels like.
What: Hero Conf San Diego 2026 — the world’s largest all-PPC conference, running alongside brightonSEO US.
When: September 15–16, 2026. The Track 2 “Paid Media Efficiency” block is September 15 at 1:55 PM.
Who to see: Brooke Osmundson on small-budget strategy, Breanne Bartlett on optimization signals, and our live build.
Where: San Diego Convention Center. Registration and the full talk lineup are at ppchero.com.
One honest note: the three sessions share the 1:55 PM Track 2 listing, so check the on-site schedule for exact running order within the block. Whichever order they run, the through-line is the same — efficiency comes from doing fewer things, aimed at the right target, with tools that fit the work.
If you’re going to be at Hero Conf, come find us after the block — the hallway conversations are where the real tactics get traded. And if you can’t make it, the tools we build on stage come from the same open playbook we publish here every week.
See the full Hero Conf lineup → Try Buddy in your browser →
— John
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