Why Duluth trusts AI agents with bidding, but not brand storytelling

“AI can get you to the finish line and you get to spend all your energy crossing the finish line,” said Ellie Uberto, director of marketing at Duluth. She was speaking during a live recording of the Digiday Podcast hosted during Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit event, which was held May 6-8 in Palm Springs, Calif.

At this point of the AI hype cycle, the debate is focused less on if AI agents belong in the programmatic workflow and more focused on how much control agents have in the process. 

For Duluth, that means handing over tasks like bidding and creative iteration management to AI agents. Meanwhile, brand voice, sense of humor and Duluth’s overall brand ethos are held closer to the chest with more human oversight, per Uberto. 

In regards to the agentic ad buying process, Duluth’s agency partner manages agentic bidding on behalf of the brand. Uberto did not share the name of the agency partner.

“We’re comfortable with it because we know that our agency knows us very well,” Uberto told Digiday. “They understand what our goals and objectives are. They understand all the different pieces that our marketing needs to hit.”

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It’s a matter of trust. Per Uberto, Duluth is less interested in the exact prompts its agency partner is giving the AI agent or picking the exact AI models the agency is using. Instead, Uberto is more interested in how agentic systems are helping the brand be more efficient, spending more time on strategy instead of building decks or reporting, she said.

Based on the broader conversations at this year’s DPMS, Duluth may be further along than it purports. In contrast, Glenniss Richards, senior director of digital media activation at Bayer, said the brand and its in-house media team isn’t ready to trust AI agents with its ad dollars just yet because of AI’s overall inability to provide the nuance a human can. 

“It’s making us quicker, faster, certainly more agile, giving us data to digest, consume and inform our media campaigns. But it’s not owning or controlling our campaigns,” Richards said at DPMS. 

Where exactly agentic systems fit into programmatic advertising workflows is still up for debate as marketers consider pain points like agency compensation models and transparency within the models. What is clear, however, is that agents have started to move beyond the low hanging fruit tasks or campaign brainstorming and insight summaries.