An agent buying ads sounds great in theory to a lot of advertisers. Less cost, less complexity and ultimately less need for a human in the loop at all. Georgia-Pacific knows that better the most. It’s just not buying it — not yet, anyway.
According to its senior director of digital media Paras Shah it’s less that the tech isn’t ready and more that online advertising isn’t. And it will stay that way until the mess underneath it gets sorted. Drop an agent into that mess and it won’t automate the waste away so much as automate it faster, said Shah.
“An agent will only automate a repetitive task,” he continued. “And if you have waste in the system, you’re automating a repetitive task where waste continues to exist. So before we even go to a buying agent we have to clean it up or else the buying agent is going to essentially deliver subpar results.”
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