As agencies push agentic media future, execs work to ward off client rogue fears

Independent agency Tinuiti launched a “Bliss Point Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server”, opening its proprietary measurement layer directly to AI agents, enabling it to place audience, creative, media, and measurement under one server. 

And Stagwell relaunched its Assembly media agency, now named Stagwell Media, whose centerpiece is an agentic system called Machine OS that’s designed to speed up the agency’s ability to react to changing market dynamics. 

And that’s all just this week. 

But not every client is always onboard with moving so fast. The press is chock full of news of rogue agents, hacks (see: OpenAI’s execs being hauled over the coals in Australia) and a latent lack of understanding of exactly how AI works. So what’s an agency to do to convince clients it’s safe to dip into agentic waters? The answer, almost always, is human hand-holding.

“Every task and everything we do sits on a sliding scale of low to high human oversight,” said Rebekah Shalit, head of platforms at Dentsu. “Everything still requires human oversight, things that are repeatable tasks, billing, campaign reporting. [And] then there’s things like content consumption and strategic planning and long-term innovation planning that really require human craft, and I think that’s really important to keep in mind.”

“We’re not going to live in a world where robots are doing our job,” she concluded.

“When we’re building agentic solutions there’s this very strong need to have a human in the loop because they’re new, and we don’t trust them, and they make mistakes,” explained David Dworin, chief product officer at Freewheel at an Advertising Week session. “Most agentic systems are either designed with a human that has to approve everything, or very specific controls that can keep it from getting into trouble. We’re sort of working up the comfort and maturity curve right now.”

At WPP Media, Lauren Wetzel, who oversees the British holdco’s agentic development as global president of data and tech solutions, said since she’s steeped in governance and privacy issues from her background as an ad-tech exec, the caution is built into the holdco’s systems. 

“Our whole approach is that governance and human accountability are central to agentic media buying,” said Wetzel. “You can have agents that can analyze; or they can evaluate the ad inventory. It’s important that they do that across multiple media owners because that’s a feature, not a bug. They want to be able to source the best inventory. They want to be able to do that fast at scale.”

“But it also doesn’t mean that every decision should just be delegated to an agent,” she continued. “And so, particularly where there’s a financial or activation impact… We require explicit controls, approval thresholds, accountable human oversight. There’s also a clear separation between what is probabilistic AI recommendations versus what is a deterministic execution.”

Stagwell’s Slavi Samardzija, who oversees that challenger holdco’s media as global chair of media and commerce, believes the secret to keeping clients’ concerns at bay is to explain the role of the orchestrator in AI-driven activity. “It comes down to having teams whose shape has changed,” he told Digiday recently. “Where you have a disproportionately larger number of senior people who are guiding these agents, and those people need to be experts in multiple areas of media and commerce workflow.”

Finally, Carrie Drinkwater, Carat’s chief investment officer, took a slightly more bullish position.

“We look at it as an opportunity,” said Drinkwater. ”The beauty of agentic for me personally and professionally is the compound learning. For us to say to [clients], in a year we’re going to know so much about your business, your media — feeding [information] beyond just media… If we don’t start now, we’ll be behind,” she said.

“The faster you get onboard, the smarter you’ll be. And it all needs to be interoperable.” 

Media buying’s next jargon is ‘the moment’

Timing is, as they say, everything. At Advertising Week, execs from ExxonMobil, Dollar General, Chase, TripAdvisor — all of which operate commerce media networks — have been intoning about the importance of punctuality as they make a subtle pitch to buyers and clients in the audience.

Commerce media, went their argument, could provide brands the ability to hit consumers at “physical moments” (the gas pump, per Thomas Chiang, head of retail media and innovation strategy at Exxon) and “difficult to activate” moments (the store till), according to Dollar General’s Media Network vp and general manager Austin Leonard. 

Marketers need to discard outdated dogmas to seize said moments, argued Selen Ozkan, vp of growth, commerce, UK & EMEA at WPP Media. “Take a 35-year-old in New York. That person isn’t the same shopper on a Tuesday at 8 a.m. versus Friday at 9 p.m… their needs change,” she said.

Ozkan suggested brands could solve that conundrum by going beyond the calendar of sporting and cultural events and instead focusing on “micro-moments”: perusing a takeout menu, for example.

For Pepsi’s Nordics business, it meant running a video campaign in conjunction with a battery of high-impact display ads with Danish takeaway app Wolt, with the aim of increasing Pepsi sales among customers ordering in. It’s a strategy Pepsi is now rolling out in other markets, according to Jacob Thorhauge, strategy, planning and investments manager for PepsiCo in the Nordic region.

Companies in the programmatic world have been banging this drum for a while already. Seedtag, for example, frames its contextual solutions as a means for brands to meet consumers at the right moment. “Understanding the motivations behind people unlocks clues about how better to connect with them in their emotional state, and when they’re ready to make a purchase,” said Brian Danzis, Seedtag’s chief revenue officer, on a Tuesday panel. And sports-focused ad tech firms Sportradar and Genius Sports like to talk up the importance and the opportunity of advertising to audiences at a moment when they’re most likely to be engaged. For them, the right moment is probably at half-time. Genius even has a programmatic solution dubbed the “Moment Engine.”

Perhaps it’s inevitable the idea would catch on in other categories. 

Jargon aside, moments — micro or otherwise — are the next intellectual case for spending dollars marked for upper-funnel channels with retail and commerce media networks.

“Loyalty is fluid,” warned Brad Backenstose, president of clients for WPP Media, and brands that want to preserve the connection they have with customers should consider spending more consistently in broad and medium-reach channels. 

Within this framework, the “moment” is something only retail media networks can provide. Expect to hear more about it from retail media execs in the near future.

—Sam Bradley

What we’ve heard

“I think that segmentation in its natural stage, from an audience perspective, has kind of gone by the wayside. It’s really about how do we curate the right audience, bringing in first-party data from brands and publishers, and marry that with third-party data. This is one of my passion points: Third-party data gets a bad rap sometimes, but it’s someone’s first-party data filtered through something else. So it is valuable to be able to build out, especially when you have deterministic identity — that you can actually build more robust insights and understanding of audiences.”

–Julie Clark, svp of media and entertainment, TransUnion, who attended Advertising Week

On stage

The Masked CMO with Nick Cannon, 9 a.m., Great Minds Stage

Cannon appears in conversation with Dhar Mann, who spent this week as AWNY’s first chief creator officer, encouraging fewer middlemen in brokering contracts with creators.

Kerry Washington & The Simpson Street Playbook: Storytelling That Drives Business and Culture, 4:10 p.m., Great Minds Stage

Washington appears in conversation to discuss how quality storytelling can lead to higher engagement.