How much control should AI have over media buying?

**Kamiko McCoy** (0:10)
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast, a show about reducing the risk of AI agents blowing ad budgets. I'm Kamiko McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.

**Tim Peterson** (0:21)
And I'm Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday Media. Kamiko, I want to talk about the word governance, which I feel like is a word that left my vocabulary when I was no longer taking social studies classes.
But this year has become a word that's firmly in my vocabulary, to the point where I've had to relearn what it even means or what it means outside of the context of actual governments.

**Kamiko McCoy** (0:54)
I think we've been talking a lot about it when it comes to AI agents and how much they are allowed to do, what the reins look like. We talked a little bit about this on stage at DPMS earlier this year with Bayer about how there's a trust gap and governance is in the middle of that. Yeah.

**Tim Peterson** (1:15)
It feels like now this whole agentic advertising conversation has finally moved more so from the like, hey, check out what we can do. Look what we can do. Look what we can have AI do to, okay, how do we actually keep these AI agents on the rails? And maybe part of this is also colored by we've had examples now, multiple examples of OpenAI's large language model breaking out of sandboxes and hacking companies, Anthropic, then like a week later came out and was like, oh crap, actually, Cloud did that too earlier in the year. We're just letting you all know now.
And so maybe there's just something in the air, but that's all to say, felt like a really timely conversation we had for this week's episode with Scott Ensign, who is the Chief Strategy Officer of Butler Till, which is, I believe, Butler Till claims to be the first agency to have done an agentic ad buy. They started testing AI agents for ad buying back in December of last year with Pubmatic. They've done multiple tests since then, as they shared with us in this interview.

**Kamiko McCoy** (2:30)
Yeah. I think it's absolutely coming along. It's crazy how from when we had this conversation back in May, which was still not necessarily shiny object, but a lot of the railroad tracks were being built. Now, it's about like, okay, how do we maintain these railroad tracks? And some of the best practices and things like that are starting to come to fruition, at least for Butler Till. I know it's fairly early days. And when we talked to Scott, one of the interesting things that he mentioned is about like, what the aspirational room for error is in these things, and what the actual room for error is for these things. So to me, juicy conversation.

**Tim Peterson** (3:07)
Yeah. Because I mean, even like you mentioned, so I interviewed him on stage at DPMS in May. At that point, they had done, I think, two or three case studies to talk about. And then we just spoke to him, I think, two weeks ago was when we recorded this conversation. And they had more than twice as many new case studies to talk about, new channels to talk about too. Previously they were doing online display and CTV. Now they've expanded and we get even into talking about using AI agents for buying audio ads, which is interesting. So yeah, it felt like a really timely conversation. This is definitely not the last time I expect to say the word governance on this show.

**Kamiko McCoy** (3:54)
Absolutely not. And if it's not about AI, what else is it about? So with no further ado.

**Tim Peterson** (4:07)
Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

**Scott Ensign** (4:11)
Good morning. Thanks so much for having me.

**Tim Peterson** (4:13)
Happy to have you. So you and I spoke at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit earlier this year, in May of this year. Kimiko was in the room as well. And in that session, we talked about a couple of major case studies you all at Butler-Till had done in using AI agents as part of ad buying workflows. There was one with Pubmatic buying CTV inventory, and then there was another with Yahoo and Scope 3 That was more of a like using AI agents as part of more of a direct deal. So different types of campaigns or different types of buys that you all tested.
That was as of May. Have there been any new major tests Butler-Till has conducted involving AI agents since then?

**Scott Ensign** (5:01)