For all the talk about efficiency in programmatic, the industry still spends an awful lot of money on impressions that don’t really matter.
A big part of the problem is how the buy side defines “efficiency,” argues Scott Ensign, chief strategy officer at indie media agency Butler/Till, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
The incentives are still skewed toward cheap reach, he says, despite the fact that those so-called bargains come with ugly side effects, including low-quality inventory and ads showing up next to, in some cases, the worst-possible content.
“I’ve often compared the problems with programmatic quality to the War on Drugs in the ’80s,” Ensign says, referencing an op-ed he wrote last year in The Current about an Adalytics report that found child sexual abuse material being monetized through the programmatic supply chain.
He thinks buyers need to take a more active role in policing their own supply chains instead of assuming that their partners have everything under control. “There is only so much that you can do in the form of supply restrictions,” Ensign says. “You have to interrogate the root causes of the demand at the same time.”
Against that backdrop, Butler/Till has been experimenting with agentic AI, not to replace human buyers, he says, but to test new ways of making buying decisions and tackling some of the “really bad” patterns he sees in programmatic today.
Late last year, Butler/Till did an experiment with PubMatic to run what was essentially a fully autonomous, end-to-end agentic CTV campaign for Geloso Beverage Group, which makes alcoholic drinks.
There was no traditional DSP workflow involved and no manual optimization. The campaign was activated using PubMatic’s Agentic OS platform entirely within Claude, which is Butler/Till’s preferred generative AI environment. Butler/Till submitted a natural language brief and PubMatic’s agents interpreted it, generated the media strategy, initiated the campaign setup and then continuously optimized pacing, targeting and performance.
The results were pretty good. Butler/Till was able to cut supply-chain and tech costs by roughly 80% and get 40% more impressions on the same budget, with a 98% video completion rate and less than 1% waste.
Zooming out, all of this points to a very different kind of programmatic marketplace on the horizon, albeit one in which people still have an important role to play. (Just don’t refer to it as “human in the loop.” Ensign is so over that phrase.)
It’ll be “human media buyers running campaigns,” he says, “but heavily augmented by agentic technology.”
Also in this episode: What’s up with that beef between AgenticAdvertising.org and the IAB Tech Lab over agentic protocols, how Butler/Till uses curation and agentic tools to cut waste and avoid junk inventory and why Ensign is confident that DSPs will survive in an agentic future – but only if they evolve.
For more articles featuring Scott Ensign, click here.
