The Agentic Gap: Why Brand Marketers Aren't Listening

It’s time for an Agentic heat check. After the ANA Media conference last week and CES in January, one thing is clear: agentic is not yet landing with brand marketers.

At CES, I was in a room with around 30 brand marketing leaders and their agency counterparts. A presenter asked for a show of hands of who’s heard of AdCP. Three hands went up. Mine, and two other ad tech partners. I am certain it would have been the same for ARTF.

No one GAF.

At ANA Media, the only mentions of agentic, which was missing from most presentations entirely, was the focus on agentic-assisted shopping. Brands are very clear that consumers are already turning to AI to make buying decisions, and they are bought into a world where agents make purchases, and that there is a big transformation in how brands engage with consumers and their agents.

But the rewriting of ad tech via an agentic layer or protocol? It’s not really on their minds. Nor will it be, until it feels much less noisy and much more tangible. It’s noisy because the industry is squabbling over standards, nearly every company started claiming agentic capabilities in a very short period of time without credible specifics about what’s changed and how it works, and most critically, barely anyone is putting it in terms of better consumer connections.

If I’ve taken anything away from my attendance at my 4th ANA Media conference, it’s everything brands care about tracks back clearly to how it connects them to the consumer.

The ARTF is closer on this front: a bidding agent living in an SSP brings a model directly into the bidstream for unfiltered, real-time decisioning that can be custom-written to the rules a brand sets for what context to reach its prime consumers at the right price.

But that can sound like a bunch of ad tech blather to 80% or more of brand marketers, because it sounds like a technical solution that optimizes the margins of a stack. When in reality, what it does is open up a world of new possibilities to find untapped consumers in underpriced media assets. Put like that, it sounds a lot closer to hunting down and negotiating some great content deals in the upfront.

At the ANA, there was some acknowledgment that agentic workflows will impact how teams work, but there was a lot of skepticism. Shenan Reed, Global Chief Media Officer at GM, shined a light on why: “I am concerned my team will be responsible for results they cannot understand or manage.” In other words, this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve learned that black boxes that promise me optimization often just lead to gaming a system that’s hard to see how it’s rigged. Reed wants real business value, and she is not convinced agents will be able to tell what that is.

But there was hope. At a private dinner event, Karolina Tuszewicka Martínez said the thing that seemed to ring most true: “I just hope it gives us back the parts of the job that we loved.” There it is.

Reed said it differently: “My hope is it turns my buyers to makers, and my briefers to builders.”

The promise of agentic workflows should be, at its core, about giving brand marketers back control, not taking it away. Control to decide how to configure modular tech based on their choices for what drives real business impact. This requires a bigger shift in media than agentic. It’s a shift to making the tech work for the brands, not the brands work for the tech.

This requires tectonic shifts that have already begun to slowly reshape the landscape. Decoupling decisioning from the platform, for custom models trained to a brand’s choice of outcome, not a platform proxy. To measurement that is a fast, actionable feedback loop while bridging the measured outcomes to real business indicators. To talking about advertising technology in terms of results that matter to the board and can be referred to on earnings calls as growth drivers.

If advertising technology firms really want to break through to brands, slapping “agentic” onto every product marketing material and press release won’t do it. It’s likely to be counterproductive. Brand marketers are, at their core, intuitives. That’s why they are obsessed with and are great at building consumer connections. And it’s why they can assess, without technical knowledge, when a new technology isn’t really where everyone is saying it is.

Let’s build an agentic future grounded in the core principle of making consumer connections better, by enabling brand marketers to do what they are best at: creating a special alchemy of creating connections that bring consumers closer.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.