The spectacle of Madison Avenue explaining that it has everything under control has been a reliable feature of the business since someone first had to reassure a client that television would not corrupt the youth. This week, the reassurance concerns the robots.
A procession of agencies has announced initiatives involving what the industry is now calling "agentic media" — systems in which artificial intelligence does not merely recommend but acts, placing bids, shifting budgets, and otherwise conducting the business that human media planners once performed with spreadsheets and telephones. Dentsu's Carat unit said it is working with NBCUniversal, Freewheel, and an A.I. firm called Newton on a system for upfront buying that at least one luxury retail client is already using. (None of the parties would identify the client, which suggests either confidentiality agreements or prudent hedging.) Tinuiti, the independent agency, introduced something called a Bliss Point Model Context Protocol Server, which is exactly as self-explanatory as it sounds. And Stagwell relaunched its Assembly media agency under the name Stagwell Media, with a system called Machine OS at its center.
The common thread in the announcements was not the technology itself but the insistence that humans remain involved. "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," said David Dworin, chief product officer at Freewheel, at Advertising Week. Lauren Wetzel, who oversees agentic development at WPP, said her systems require "explicit controls, approval thresholds, accountable human oversight."
The message to clients, in other words, is that the robots are doing the work but not making the decisions — or at least not the expensive ones.
Slavi Samardzija, who runs media for Stagwell, suggested the key was employing more senior people to supervise the machines. This is the sort of solution that sounds reassuring until one recalls that the appeal of automation was supposed to be efficiency.
Still, the agencies are pressing forward. "If we don't start now, we'll be behind," one executive said, which is the kind of sentence that tends to precede both genuine innovation and expensive mistakes in roughly equal measure.
Original story published in Digiday: "Agencies push agentic media while warding off client rogue fears", by Michael Bürgi, Sam Bradley