It was already a strain that 22-year-old English and art history majors staffed media departments. Now as the media markets evolve into something more akin to a wall street trading environment or, perhaps more accurately, a team of software engineers, agencies are looking to hire a different breed of media recruit.

Especially in the face of an immature market that lacks established integration suites that would allow buyers to just employ an Adwords-type interface to make buying decisions, media jobs are demanding more skills toward the STEM majors.

In the proliferating and already-fragmented market of real-time bidding and programmatic buying, it is rare that an agency has the expertise and capacity to effortlessly swap out employed systems from one media buy to the next. They often first make choices of which pools of media make the most sense to deal with, and then often have to develop their own systems to help manage interacting with those systems.

There appears to be a direct correlation between the technical acumen of the buyers and their capacity to employ more of these systems, and thereby serve their clients' needs in a way that best maximizes those clients' objectives.