Why agentic media buying is becoming a client-by-client configuration job

Butler/Till should know. The independent media agency has been testing programmatic media buying agents for months now, concluding at least half a dozen new tests since May, Scott Ensign, chief strategy officer at Butler/Till, told Digiday.

Experiments started with CTV now include online video, display and streaming audio. But with each new client, LLM platform or channel expansion, the guardrails change. 

“The future is going to be an enterprise layer of AI in general, but specifically with agentic,” Ensign said. “Those environments are going to have to be controlled on a client by client basis.” The agency exec recently joined the Digiday Podcast to share updates about Butler/Till’s agentic ad buying initiatives. 

Butler/Till’s client roster includes pharmaceutical and medical device companies, financial services as well as agriculture and alcohol — all of which have different levels of risk aversion, and all of which expect “completely error-free work,” Ensign said. 

Clients are approaching with caution before handing over their ad budgets to AI agents, and Butler/Till is still building guardrails. That’s apparent in the amount of ad dollars, which is “low, single-digital in terms of the amount of spend going through this right now,” Ensign said, who declined to offer specific spend figures. 

But if you ask Ensign, it’s only a matter of time before that spend figure grows to double digits.

“If we all work together and share this stuff about what’s working, what’s making things better in our space, we could perhaps create a little wave of improvement instead of just racing to the bottom,” he said.