Andrea Kwiatek is speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference in New York City on September 28–29. If you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, you can secure your seat here.
The ad industry is infatuated with AI. But its less sexy counterpart – supply-path optimization (SPO) – is still a hot topic, too.
AI can add more operational efficiency to the media buying process. At the same time, AI represents yet another way to buy media in a landscape that’s already rife with friction and fragmentation. Those additional hops in media buying are the pain points SPO strategies aim to solve for in the back-end.
It will take some more time before AI agents are a seamless part of the modern media buying process, Andrea Kwiatek, director of strategic partnerships at the indie agency Goodway Group, told AdExchanger.
To help move the process along, Goodway Group is actively testing agentic media buying. The tests involve feeding buyer agents a client’s campaign media briefs and assessing which audiences and inventory sources the seller agent recommends, Kwiatek said. She added that the agency will have more to say soon about how those tests are going soon. (Stay tuned.)
As an industry, we can’t move “full steam ahead [with] a shiny new object” without first making sure that shiny object – AI – can stick to the guidelines and parameters it is assigned, Kwiatek said.
Kwiatek spoke with AdExchanger about the evolution of SPO and how the introduction of agentic AI is adding even more change to today’s media buying landscape.
AdExchanger: The rules of SPO have evolved over the years. From the agency perspective, what does SPO mean to you today?
ANDREA KWIATEK: As a media buyer, one of the top priorities is making sure that a client is seeing increased value from their spend. In this case, value for an advertiser means achieving business outcomes as well as having transparency and confidence that we are spending their budgets in the way that makes the most sense.
SPO is not about cutting out partners. It is more about understanding what those partners are able to support in terms of outcomes and sustainable business growth. As an agency, taking these steps is part of establishing a partnership with brand clients, rather than acting as just a vendor.
The sentiment of working with a brand as a partner rather than as a vendor is a concept I have heard before. What exactly does it look like in practice for Goodway Group?
For us, that means taking point as a knowledge leader for clients to vet third-party partners [such as programmatic platforms and data and identity providers] for them. We have to know everything about those prospective partners inside and out. That understanding requires getting enough transparency from these companies to get under the hood and see how their methodologies work rather than just believing that they work.
This approach is a big gap between independent agencies and holding companies, where many decisions are made and communicated from the top down. Here, it’s the reverse.
I hear that a good SPO strategy means holding third-party vendors to a higher standard, not just cutting them out. But those higher standards mean that not all partners will make the cut. What might cause Goodway Group to suggest that clients drop certain partners?
We have a very rigorous validation process to determine which partners we want to work with on behalf of our clients. Those partners have to agree to a certain level of transparency, pricing and customization requests that would support our brand clients’ needs.
Once we decide which partners best suit our clients, we use third-party verification platforms to help us make sure that those partners we chose are following the rules we’ve established. We also use verification partners to ensure that the programmatic platforms we’re working with adhere to our requests regarding which third-party partners we do and do not want to work with.
The rise of AI agents are also adding complexity to the media supply chain and buying process. How is Goodway Group navigating the introduction of agentic media buying while still prioritizing SPO?
To us, agentic AI represents another way of transacting media. Ideally, AI can help clients save money and build more effective campaigns by allocating more of their budget toward working media.
At Goodway Group, we’re currently doing tests to determine whether agentic infrastructure can work as effectively as programmatic buying when we direct agents to only buy media through the paths we approve.
What worries me is that there are a lot of agents out there. Buyer and seller agents have their own goals, and there must be a level of transparency between those two agents to ensure they can follow the same instructions and act in the best interests of the client. Ensuring that will require even more verification and validation efforts on both sides.
For example, the last thing we want is for the seller agent to curate inventory that does not optimize value for the advertiser.
As an agency, how exactly does the introduction of agentic buying change your expectations around transparency?
What we don’t want is for AI to become another media-buying black box or walled garden that makes it difficult for us to understand how transactions occur. That lack of transparency makes it difficult for us to help clients replicate the buying patterns that work for future campaigns.
In the end, clients want transparency so they can prove what buying paths are working in terms of their desired outcomes.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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