AI & ADTECH: Agentic AI platforms will reshape media planning, buying, and creative workflows

Sep 7, 2025

This week, Rio Longacre, a marketing transformation expert with over two decades of experience, dives into the world of Agentic AI. He emphasizes its potential to revolutionize media planning, highlighting the shift from traditional dashboards to real-time decision-making. Longacre addresses ad fraud, skepticism about brand motivations, and warns that junior media staff may be left behind in the AI revolution. He also discusses the evolution of agencies into strategic governance roles, and the future where AI could eliminate verification duopolies.

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INSIGHT

Agentic AI Will Remake Ad Ops

Agentic AI will coordinate planning, bidding, creative and auditing by running teams of cooperating agents.
This shift could replace many trafficking and operational roles and force agencies to reinvent their value.

INSIGHT

FTE Model Faces Structural Decline

Large armies of FTEs doing trafficking and bid management are unsustainable once agentic AI scales.
Expect massive downsizing of operational teams and more lean in-house AI teams supporting strategy.

ADVICE

Buy Not Build For Most CMOs

CMOs should evaluate whether to buy AI platforms rather than build them in-house.
Use AI adoption to reconsider in-housing decisions case-by-case and prioritize vendor selection.

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Welcome back to another episode of The ADOTAT Show, the most-watched podcast in adtech, marketing, and media. This week we’re joined by Rio Longacre, a voice in the industry who isn’t afraid to call out the fraud, the fear, and the fantasy dashboards that have defined digital advertising for far too long.

We’re talking Agentic AI—not the buzzwordy “AI tools” you use to rewrite an email subject line, but real autonomous agents that plan, bid, create, reconcile, and audit ad spend in real time. This is the leap from dashboards to decisions, from button-pushers to bots, from agencies as “labor shops” to agencies as governance layers. If you’ve been following the hype around AI in advertising, this is the conversation that separates signal from noise.

💡 What We Cover in This Episode:

How Agentic AI platforms will reshape media planning, buying, and creative workflows

Why junior media staffers trafficking campaigns are standing on the tracks while the AI hype train barrels forward

The truth about ad fraud, MFA sites, and FOFO economics (Fear of Finding Out)

Why many brands don’t really want outcomes—they want cover

The coming collapse of SaaS moats built on dashboards, reporting, and verification layers

How agencies will survive—ugly but resilient—by evolving into arbiters of strategy, governance, and publisher trust

The future of in-housing 2.0, where brands use lean AI teams instead of armies of button-pushers

The end of curation taxes and verification duopolies when AI can pre-check fraud in real time

How engineers are using AI like a Ferrari at 200 mph while marketers are still doing laps in the Costco parking lot

📊 Keywords for the Curious (aka the future of adtech):

Adtech, advertising technology, programmatic advertising, CTV, connected TV, AI in advertising, Agentic AI, autonomous agents, ad fraud, MFA (Made-for-Advertising), SPO (Supply Path Optimization), curation, verification, DoubleVerify, IAS, Scope3, identity vendors, retail media, SaaS moats, dashboards, procurement, incrementality, attention metrics, in-housing, media planning, media buying, creative production, audience curation, automation, marketing technology, Rio Longacre, Freestar, Kurt Donnell, Troutman Amin LLP, Incremental.com.

🎙️ Why This Matters:

The adtech ecosystem is at an inflection point. Fraud persists not because people don’t see it, but because the incentives are aligned to ignore it. Agentic AI is the first real chance to flip those incentives—from “spend and smile” to “budget-before-benefit.” That means contracts with teeth, AI audit loops that reconcile spend automatically, and governance structures that make fraud unprofitable.

👉 Next Week: Don’t miss our conversation with Kurt Donnell, CEO and founder of Freestar. We’ll dive into how he built one of the most successful independent adtech companies and what’s next for publishers and platforms in 2025.

🙏 Special Thanks to Our Sponsors:

Troutman Amin LLP — The lions of legal in advertising and media

Incremental.com — Proof-driven measurement for brands who want more than vanity metrics

⚡ Subscribe to The ADOTAT Show for weekly deep dives into adtech, AI, marketing, and media. Turn on notifications so you don’t miss an episode—because if you’re not paying attention, someone else’s AI is already outbidding you.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.