Episode 177: Scott Ensign of Butler/Till on Innovation at Indy Agencies

**Jeremy Bloom** (0:00)
Oh, hello, I'm Jeremy Bloom, co-founder and CEO of Marketecture Media. And boy, do I have news for you. Marketecture Live is back. And if you've been watching from a distance, thinking that looks phenomenal, but a trip to New York is just a bridge, or several, too far, we've got great news for you. We're bringing Marketecture Live to the beating heart of AdLand. That's right. On September 23rd, 2026, Marketecture Live is coming to Chicago. We're going to be bringing the same sold out energy, sharp insights, and industry-defining conversations to the center of advertising's biggest transformations, from media and commerce, to AI, tech, and modern marketing. This is where the people shaping what's next for the ad industry will be, want to be, and need to be. Early registration is live now, so lock in your ticket at chicago.marketexturalive.com.
Again, lock in your ticket at chicago.marketexturalive.com.
Disclaimer, I live in Chicago. It's not Chicago, it's Chicago.

**Ari Paparo** (1:26)
From the center of European ad tech, because I'm on vacation with my family, and what is the center of European ad tech? It is the Charlotte Street Hotel. So shout out to all of my UK European peeps, the ATF Slack group, and all of those people who center around this very hotel that I am now on vacation at, not doing anything ad tech related, except for this podcast. And I'm ducking my head down when I walk down the streets, trying not to see anyone I know.
And let me introduce of course my co-host, Eric Franchi, who is comfortably at home doing the normal VC business he does. How are you doing, Eric?

**Eric Franchi** (2:05)
I'm doing great, and I'm doing the normal VC business. I have no English accent I can pull out to try to like razz you, so I'm not going to try to do it. But I can give you some help for missing what has been an incredible NBA Finals for your New York Knicks.

**Ari Paparo** (2:22)
Can I tell you how sick I am?
I'm sick about this. So I figured out about a week or a week and a half ago, I looked at the calendar and I was like, oh, I'm looking forward to this vacation, and then my other half of my brain was like, oh, the Knicks in five, Knicks in six, and I was like, oh no, those things overlap. So I'm in the wrong time zone, and last night I went to sleep, there was no way, I'm still a jet lag, there was no way I was staying up till two in the morning to watch the game, and I wake up at six in the morning, and I check my phone expecting to just see the highlights. It was a game, it happened, and the headlines are all, the greatest game in NBA history, the greatest day in the history of New York City, the greatest comeback in the history of the NBA finals. If you miss this game, you should just kill yourself. That was basically the headlines this morning.

**Eric Franchi** (3:13)
Basically, and what a game, what an ending, my God. And New York is absolutely electric. So hopefully, you'll be here for the finals when they win.

**Ari Paparo** (3:27)
I don't think I am. I think I'm still going to be on vacation. This is going to be the worst vacation ever. Anyway, next in five.

**Eric Franchi** (3:33)
That was fun. What do we got on the pod for this week?

**Ari Paparo** (3:38)
Yeah, since I'm on vacation, we're going to do things a little bit differently. Let's do the news first. And then we have an interview that I conducted last week with Scott Ensign, who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Butler Till, and he's going to tell us about what they're doing as an independent agency for some of the cutting-edge topics. We've seen them putting out press releases and information about gaming, where they talked to Marketecture Live about that, AI, where they were one of the parties to what was called the first ad CPAPI transaction ever. They just hired a friend of the pod, Manny Puentes, as Chief Product Officer. There's a lot of stuff going on at Butler Till. It's a great little update. So we'll do that after the news and say that before the news, we hope our listeners can deal with a little change in their lives. They won't freak out and send us mail and stuff like that.
So let's just jump into it. Give us the news, Eric.

**Eric Franchi** (4:30)
All right. Let's break it into three categories. The first is going to be AI and ads and AI. The second is going to be like interesting stuff going on in the creator space, and then just like whole slate of ad tech news, programmatic stuff, our wheelhouse. So we'll go in order. Ads and AI. So we started this week with an interesting e-marketer forecast from Nate Elliott, who we had on the pod earlier this year, fantastic episode, and they're forecasting that ads in AI, which is now inclusive of AI Search Adjacent, as well as like conversational search and chatbots, is going to be a $32 billion market this year.