Two robots bought a billboard while you were in a standup
The first fully agentic out-of-home buy just ran. No human at the handoff.
TGIF!
The media buy you spent your twenties learning to do just happened without a person in the room.
On July 22, Broadsign and the agency Draft Digital ran what they’re calling the first fully agentic out-of-home campaign: a buy-side agent and a sell-side agent negotiating and closing the deal end to end. Two machines, one billboard, no human at the handoff.
Easy to file this under “cool demo, not my channel.” That’s the wrong read. The interesting part isn’t out-of-home.
It’s that the whole choreography of media buying, the back-and-forth that justified a lot of headcount, is now something two agents can run between themselves.
Which relocates the job. When the execution is autonomous, your leverage isn’t in placing the buy. It’s in the objectives, the constraints, and the guardrails the agents operate inside. You stop being the negotiator and start being the person who wrote the rules the negotiators can’t break.
That’s a better job, mostly. It’s also a quieter one, and quiet is uncomfortable for a profession that has always measured itself by how busy it looks.
— Peter & Torsten
Numbers matter
48% — How much faster retailers running shopper agents grew sales, by Salesforce’s data, with AI-referred traffic converting at 8x the rate of social.
The agents aren’t only buying the media now. They’re outperforming on the sell side too.
Daily prompt
We’re piloting an AI agent to run a media buy end to end. Act as a cautious head of growth. Draft the operating brief the agent must follow: the objective, the hard budget and bid limits, the brand and placement rules it can never break, and the exact conditions under which it must stop and ask a human. Then list the three ways a literal-minded agent could hit the target and still embarrass us.
Use this before the first autonomous anything touches your budget. The brief you’d write for a new hire is the brief the agent needs too, except the agent follows it exactly, which is both the upside and the trap. Write the guardrails once and every future pilot starts from a safer place.
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CMO corner
You don’t need to touch every project. Shape the system that guides them.
This is the whole week in one line. Discovery, production, the media buy, all drifting toward autonomous. Your job keeps moving up a level, from doing the thing to defining what “good” means for it. Say it precisely enough and the system holds. Leave it vague and you’ll be back in the standup.
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Tool upgrade
If agents are going to run parts of your funnel, start where the guardrails are easy to set. Three tools for putting agents to work:
Chatbase — best for building an agent on your own data and setting exactly what it can and can’t say. Try Chatbase here →
Reply — best for an AI SDR running multichannel outreach end to end, on rules you set. Try Reply here →
Lemlist — best for outreach sequences that personalize at scale while a human still owns the list. Try Lemlist here →
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Learn this
The version of leadership this whole week keeps pointing at:
Fifty theses on leading when the doing is done for you, written for the exact moment your job stops being execution and starts being the rules execution runs on. Read it the way you’d read a mirror.
We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.
Brand slop
Equinox found out how the automation goes. This week the luxury gym pulled an AI-generated out-of-home ad and apologized after dozens of Asian creators called it out for dehumanizing and sexualizing East Asian women. The campaign was named, with no irony available for purchase, “Question Everything but Yourself.”
Nobody in that thread was asking whether a human made it. They could tell.
The ad went up. It reached a billboard. It got photographed, condemned, and pulled, in that order, and the brand was last to the conversation about its own ad.
That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
