Media Buying Briefing: Overheard at Media Buying Summit: How AI is helping and hurting client relations and office work

The following are direct quotes from the attendees, but have been lightly edited for space and clarity.

Client expectations vs delivery

“We see a lot of our clients with thinner budgets, but expecting the world. And we go over hours quite a bit because they just ask for more things than are in the plan. We have to pull back sometimes and level set, but it still gets hard when the clients just expect so much.”

“It comes down to the brief. I’ve seen some of the worst briefs I’ve ever seen in my career recently, and it’s because they’re so disjointed and there’s no through line on what the not only the marketing goal is as well as the business goal … I think AI is making it worse. It’s like pontificating on a sentence structure that makes it 10 pages long instead of a sentence. And less is more when it comes to a brief. In that case, especially when you’re trying to drive down to your goals.”

“Yeah, briefs have definitely gotten worse, and they’re also like jam packed with a lot of things that feel like they start to blur together the swim lanes between what media’s job is versus a creative job or a PR driven job.”

“We’ve had living briefs of sorts. You fill out the questions first, and we have the follow up meeting, and we go through it to make sure we really understand what you think you’re putting in there. A lot of folks have those meetings after the fact, but if they are being bad clients and they’re doing things that they shouldn’t, then maybe it’s a way to circumvent that, get ahead of it before you get this word vomit brief that doesn’t mean anything.”

“We’ve just written the briefs for the clients … they give us their things and we say we’re just going to write this for you, and we write it. They’re like, ‘This is great,’ And our team also thinks this is great because our team just wrote it.”

AI’s impact on communication

“I’ve actually been surprised by how much AI content [there is at] a higher strategy level … places like the VPs and the C-suite. I know they know how to do these things. I don’t think they want to take the time to do it. Because this is much easier.”

“I’ve been getting more and more that even with our higher ups at the agency themselves because of that same mentality.” But we’re seeing the same thing from clients too that give us a generated prompt of what they think that they need.”

“I’ve been in meetings where I can tell every person who contributed to that meeting, it’s all AI generated slides where I’m like, ‘You’ve provided the bare minimum information and it just spit these out — you didn’t even look at them. You just threw them up there.’ It kind of has that uncanny valley feeling — they think this makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense. It’s very prevalent, probably more than we actually realize.”

“If they use it to write a quick email or to organize their thoughts, I don’t see any shame in that. But I think there’s probably a deeper level of generation happening that is leading to this output where this is a mess. This is not clear. This doesn’t feel human.”

“AI just ramps up the level of crap.”

“We actually had a client who had somebody else write a brief for them, and it was clearly written with AI. And you could tell the client didn’t have any idea what was in it because we went back to the client [and said] ‘Half of this stuff is not doable.’ It was 18 pages long. It was it was a lot.”

“If you’ve got a super long email with 50 m dashes in it, maybe call the person back and ask what they want to do, versus responding to it and having your team run around for a week trying to write the right response with 60 m dashes back. I think we should do a better job as agency leaders to train our staff to interact with the clients in a way that is personal versus just responding to back and forth emails.”

How to use AI

“There’s two forks in the road for the world of agencies. One fork is, ‘I’m going to fully automate everything and eliminate as many humans and costs as possible.’ The other fork in the road is, ‘I’m going to create efficiency and enable the humans I already have, and lean into expertise and make those experts more efficient at what they do, so they can deliver more value for clients.’ So, if I was working at an organization that’s going for full automation and limiting humans, I would be scared. I would argue that’s not the right strategy.”

“I tell our staff, ‘Do your resume every six months, and if you’re not learning stuff here, advancing your skill sets, you should quit and go work someplace else.’ Because you have these people that have been at agencies for 10 or 15 or 20 years. That is not the way to evolve your business and or help your clients grow. So if we’re not pushing the staff to learn new things and keep the sort of ship afloat, you’re going to have these issues where an AI bot spends $10 million versus $10,000 in a DSP, and it’s going to be like, I don’t know what to do.”

The Case For and Against Principal media 

Few topics are as deeply divisive as principal media. Which is why Digiday used it to launch a new franchise at the Media Buying Summit last week: The Case For and Against. 

Stagwell’s purchase of Freestar marks an expansion of the agency’s owned media practice — and provides a decent jumping off point to rehearse some of the pro and anti arguments around agencies deploying client ad spend agains owned, principal or proprietary media.

Onstage at the summit, Forrester vp and senior agency analyst Jay Pattisall argued for the practice’s use, against Crossmedia co-founder and CEO Kamran Asghar, who took the opposing view.

Pattisall said that principal media was an established way of doing business for large agencies, one that could be handled fairly in the client’s interests, provided agencies disclosed its use and provided opt-outs for skeptical clients.

“It’s here, it’s not going anywhere… so if you’re going to do it, do it well,” he said. Moreover, Pattisall said principal media could provide a release valve for agencies suffering margin compression, publishers struggling to evenly monetize inventory, and clients looking for flexibility in their media investments. “You’re getting a win-win-win,” he said.

Asghar, in contrast, said principal based media trading eroded marketing services groups’ roles as agents — and it barred agencies from meeting demand from marketers for a pricing model or relationship that rewards meeting business outcomes.

“We’ll never get to outcome-based pricing in our industry as long as principal media exists, because a revenue model of taking a kickback or a volume bonus far outweighs anything you’re going to ever earn on an outcome-based basis,” he said.

Asghar argued that if agencies are to engage in principal-based media, they should take a leaf from the financial sector’s book: separate trading and advisory  businesses properly, so that clients opting out of principal media can ensure they’re dealing with an honest broker. “There needs to be clear separation between church and state, in my mind,” he said.

“Where there’s murkiness, there’s money to be made,” he added. — Sam Bradley

Color by numbers

Whether it’s avid fandom or long-held nostalgia, viewers with an emotional connection to a movie or a streaming series make for a fertile advertising audience, according to a report from Disney’s U.K. arm. The House of Mouse surveyed 1,100 streaming users and measured their engagement levels in an eye-tracking study, as well as a brand lift study. The bottom line? Fandom means a hyper-engaged audience:

• 2.5 times: Emotionally connected viewers showed a detailed ad recall two and a half times better than viewers considered un-engaged.
• 4 times: The increase in purchase intent among fan viewers, compared with non-fan streaming users.
• 4.7 times: The ad recall improvement among viewers that rewatched a show or movie and were served ads multiple times. (Think of two types of parent — one who’s enduring their sixteenth Frozen rewatch of the month, versus one showing a toddler Fantasia or Snow White for the first time). —SB

Takeoff & landing

• WPP, S4 Capital and Stagwell issued Q3 earnings last week. While WPP slowed the shrinkage of its business in Q3, which is an encouraging sign, its year-to-date numbers remain down, with WPP Media growing 0.3% in Q3 (in Q3 2025 it had been down 5.6% compared to ’24) but still down 3.6% YTD.  S4 saw revenue declines accelerate with a 9.5% drop in Q3 revenue (YTD dropped a lesser 6.3%) as both marketing and tech services saw slides. Stagwell offered much more positive numbers in Q3, with quarterly revenue growth of 10% and YTD growth at 8%, mainly on its digital transformation and marketing cloud units. The media unit actually contracted for Q3.
• Account moves: WPP Media won the Transport for London media business … DentsuX won home improvement chain Kingfisher’s B&Q and Screwfix brands’ media business for the U.K. and Ireland.
• Personnel moves: Vayner Media named Anita Munro to be managing director for Asia Pacific, coign over from WPP Media where she was CEO for Thailand … Crossmedia tapped Stefanie Wolf as managing director, head of new business, coming over from Dentsu’s iProspect, where she was vp of business development … WPP’s CMI Media Group promoted Sargi Mann to chief strategy officer from evp head of strategy … Indie full-service shop Schafer Condon Carter hired Cara Wetters as its chief media officer. 

Direct quote

“I think what’s driving changes in marketing expenditure is not a bad economy. It’s a good economy. I think change is being driven by technological revolution, not not by economic devolution … in our segment growth, we’re up 23% in digital transformation. We’re up 100% in the marketing cloud. If you project out growth in those two segments for the next two years, we become a fundamentally revalued company, more of a tech and tech services company.”

— Mark Penn, CEO of Stagwell, on his company’s Q3 financial results.

Speed reading

• Seb Joseph analyzed some of WPP CEO Cindy Rose’s comments during the holdco’s Q3 earnings call to figure out why Apple’s latest move against ad tracking won’t hurt it as badly. Hint: InfoSum. 
• Sam Bradley echoed the sentiments of many of the above townhall attendees with a story quoting several onstage conversations at the Media Buying Summit about how AI is either helping or challenging office patterns and work at agencies.
• Bradley also looked at how the last surge of political spending is impacting marketers’ need to get holiday advertising into the market. It’s not been easy or cheap.