Media Buying Briefing: Overheard at the Media Buying Summit: AI can be your best friend or worst enemy

But there are also positive impacts that AI has had on the workings of media agencies, from saving time and resources on RFPs to possibly coming up with things no one human could have imagined. Never say never.

Here’s an edited selection of quotes, all provided under Chatham House Rules that allow for candor and anonymity, among the Town Hall’s agency-only participants.

They’ve been edited lightly for space and clarity. 

CHALLENGES

AI aș a negative

“If we are using Chat GPT for … information, anybody else can have it. So those insights and that information that we’re receiving is not differentiated, and it doesn’t have our human element to it. So that is a frustration when they’re just coming and saying, ‘Oh, this is the insight that we have.’ Well, yeah, you have it but [your] competitors have that same data. It’s just it’s not bespoke to the individual brand.”

“AI is not good at mathematics. It’s not going to give you the right answer, [because] it’s not going to calculate it correctly. That’s a perception that a lot of people [have] — they just trust the output. If you actually took it back to Excel and ran your own numbers and analysis, you’re not gonna get a one-to-one match.”

“It’s also kind of undermining a lot of media research tools that are the industry standard, like Simmons or Scarborough, where we’re putting in custom audiences of who we’re trying to reach … People tend to go with the AI, because it’s more buzzy, so it kind of undermines what we do as media planning when it comes down to strategy.”

“It’s good at checking. But I would also add that we’re not using public agents. You have to train your your team not to do that. Don’t upload the RFP to ChatGPT.”

The RFP process has become almost untenable

“You can get inundated with a litany of RFPs, and they give you about two weeks to respond to it. The last one we submitted 160 pages because of the single space types 10-page thing that they gave us, and they went to six different agencies. So that’s a problem. It’s also run by procurement, so that’s a problem because you don’t know whether or not it’s price driven. and then a lot of the answers are the same. If we put in as much time and effort in our current clients that we do in the clients that we’re pitching, we’d be a lot better off.” 

“We keep going into RFPs, we show up really well, and have clients who want to work with us, but they keep coming back and saying that we’re too expensive. And we’re willing to work with them, obviously … but we are being undercut at a rate that there is no way for us to be profitable. We’ve kind of pushed against that throughout the year. Now we’re in Q4, we have five new accounts coming on in the next two weeks, all of which have been severely discounted. Now we have these very discounted scopes that are going to be really, really difficult to be profitable on — and also will have to be serviced without hiring new headcount. So it’s definitely a fun macro economic challenge.”

The lack of training across various skill sets

“I feel like there’s a big hole in how we train to start with, and then a few years later, we expect AI to fix the holes that were not filled in.”

“My daughter just graduated about two years ago with her master’s in digital advertising, she cannot get a job because she does not have boots on the ground experience. Every single job that she’s applied for requires three years of experience. She has the education, but she doesn’t have the experience.”

SOLUTIONS 

AI as a positive

“You can train your team to use AI in a good way. We just did a new business pitch where in 10 minutes, we got great customer sentiment, and then it was just building off from there. Our process and our research was all amplified, and it did take away hours of digging through posts on their social channels to understand what the sentiment was. We verified it, but it was just such a great jumping off point, because I think it’s so important to figure out, especially with newer staff members, how to use it to get yourself going. But never trust the answer, even if the answer is right.”

“Just starting with an AI tool to analyze the RFP, gets a good summary for the team. In certain cases, with tight deadlines, it could be a very good first crack at what we might be able to do. And who knows, it might come back with something you didn’t even think about … I don’t think I’d rely on it to write the RFP, but it’s a great sort of first look.”

Balancing news investment with brand safety

“We have a couple of brands [for whom] brand safety is incredibly important; their audiences also overlap with news consumers. The way we approach it now is that news is segmented into two different bodies. Part of it is contextually aligned on safer platforms; the design or real estate sections of newspapers. That can be always-on and we don’t have to worry about it.

Then we take all of the audience-targeted spend, which reaches across all of the URL, and do that as a PMP in our trading platform. And, if something really bad is going on, we just pause those placements. You don’t have to shut down the whole campaign all at once because you have your always-on section which is part of safe content.”

Training junior media practitioners

“Until three years ago, we had really bad habits. We were super scrappy and agile. And we didn’t take the time to really define a great process, and we didn’t listen to the feedback from the junior employees. We [since] have had a really good run of retention with junior employees. One, we [put] a process in place so they knew what to do when we knew how to train them. Two, we learned to listen to their ideas and their feedback and figure out how to bring it in.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to be AI expert. You’re not an AI expert! Why do you think they’ll be an expert? It’s a good reminder to expand the way we are hiring outside of what we know. Start looking at even communities like The Women in Programmatic Network,  Latinas in Tech, All Things Advertising. If you’re struggling to find talent right now, maybe you need to expand and be intentional to those communities. Maybe you’ll see that more new perspectives are going to come towards your team. Maybe somebody will have some AI expertise in the mix. It’s time for us to be intentional in how we hire — and once we hire, make the time and commitment to continue building these people.”

Color by numbers

With the holiday shopping season upon us, and consumers a bit unsure about how much to spend given uneven economic factors, a January Digital report seems to indicate they’re not spending less, just smarter. The report surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. respondents (ages 18–65, $80K+ household income who identified as primary shoppers). Here are a few stats from its Calculated Consumption report for Q4: 

• 81% of shoppers say their economic concerns affect their willingness to spend;
• 70% have purchased through Amazon and 55% through Walmart in the past six months;
• 86% are likely to use AI to research or make purchase decisions;
• 82% have purchased directly through social platforms in the past six months.

Takeoff & landing

• Havas’ third quarter earnings showed growth of 2.2% in total revenue over nine months compared to 2024, and organic growth of 2.8% for the same time period. Strongest regional growth over the nine months was in North America, which grew 5% over 2024, thanks in part to strong client budget growth at Havas Health. 
• Real Chemistry acquired Spring & Bond, a digital media agency specializing in healthcare, in a bid to expand its omnichannel abilities to clients. The purchase follows Real Chemistry’s acquisition of healthcare shop Greater Than One in July. 
• Account moves: Dentsu’s iProspect landed media AOR duties for Hy-Vee, including oversight of enterprise media for Hy-Vee and all its affiliates, as well as supporting the development and launch of Hy-Vee’s retail media network, RedMedia … Crossmedia landed media AOR duties for theme-park firm Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation, which includes Dollywood … Travel and tourism specialist agency Envisionit won Visit St. Pete-Clearwater (VisitSPC)’s account for media planning, advertising, and brand strategy. 
• Personnel moves: Independent PMG hired Josh Krichefski as EMEA president, coming over the same position at WPP Media … Razorfish hired Ryan Warren as chief CRM officer, coming over from Salesforce.

Direct quote

“The story behind holdco earnings is a tale of two cities. After a significant post-pandemic rebound in 2022, growth trajectories split into diverging paths, with Publicis Groupe, Havas Group and Omnicom outperforming, and Dentsu, IPG and WPP underperforming. This is the dividing line for the Big 6 becoming the Big 3 and sets the stage for a holding company gauntlet in 2026.”

—Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester on the latest holdco earnings. 

Speed reading

• Seb Joseph put Publicis’ latest earnings into perspective by explaining the increasing role AI has in contributing to revenue growth, in the words of CEO Arthur Sadoun.
• Sam Bradley explained how agencies and their legal counsels are and will be important to ensuring brands protect their IP from Sora 2’s latest video generation tool.
• I covered Ars X Machina’s new Agile Mix Modeling platform that supercharges MMM and enables clients like Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. to see and act on campaign measurement across the full funnel.