72% of Media Buyers at Digiday Summit Reject Principal Media

Seventy-two percent of attendees at Digiday's Media Buying Summit voted against principal media after an opening debate on the industry's most contested practice — the sharpest number in an event dominated by one subject: artificial intelligence.

Digiday's edit team opened the October summit by naming AI as both ubiquitous and dangerous. It's reshaping agentic buying, planning, AEO/GEO and client consulting, compressing timelines and piling new pressures onto independents and holding companies alike. The warning signs, editors noted, run from insufficient human oversight of client budgets to runaway token usage and weak ROI.

Why did principal media lose the room?

The debate pitted Kamran Asghar, CEO of Crossmedia, against Forrester vp and senior agency analyst Jay Pattisall. Asghar argued principal media — agencies buying and selling inventory for and to their own clients — has corrupted the meaning of "agency" by putting agencies on both sides of the investment equation.

• "It's here, it's not going anywhere… so if you're going to do it, do it well." — Pattisall
• "Just because it exists doesn't mean you should use it. A little like a nuclear bomb, or AI." — Asghar

Pattisall's position: it's permanent for agencies with the scale to pull it off, provided clients get sufficient transparency. The audience's 72% vote says most buyers still aren't convinced.

What does AI mean for agency talent?

M+C Saatchi CEO Nadja Bellan-White said agencies have reached a point of "over-engineering" and forgotten "the humanization factor."

• "AI can be a good sparring partner… but you need to be the one to make the decision." — Bellan-White
• "In the race for efficiency we've forgotten to train our young people the way we were trained. You have to go old school." — Bellan-White

Gila Wilensky, evp and head of data and media, North America at Monks, walked through how the company rebuilt staff structures around AI — and predicted a new job title. "There will be a full-time job of AI checkers," she said, comparing it to fact-checkers in journalism. Her bottom line: "AI cannot take risks. That's always going to be our job."

Do agencies know what AI actually costs?

Christina Riccitelli, chief innovation & analytics officer at OpAd Media, and Tony Russo, vp AI innovation & strategy at Mile Marker, tackled the cost question from two different philosophies.

"From the beginning of the year, we saw boardrooms saying 'adopt AI at all costs.' You saw these massive companies doing token maxxing, spending hundreds of millions of dollars … but it's not an open spigot anymore," Russo said.

Riccitelli said much of her agency's AI work is still internal, but transparency is the goal: "Ideally, down the road, we would be very transparent and say these are the tools that we're using, because I think it's important for everyone to kind of know how the sauce is made."

One attendee put the stakes bluntly: "You're going to have these issues where an AI bot spends $10 million versus $10,000 in a DSP, and it's going to be like, 'I don't know what to do'."

How far should agentic buying go?

David Dweck, president of Go Fish Digital, said agentic tools should strip out layers rather than add them. "Anyone who's building an agentic platform to sit on top of Meta or Google is going to be years behind where they need to be, and I think people have got to see where the train is headed," he said. His aim: agents removing DSP and supply-side layers so costs fall and inventory quality rises "without being complex."

Can transparency fix the media black box?

Devin Bellamy of sports gaming company Underdog and Eden Collective founder and CEO Alison Monk took aim at blind platform algorithms, self-reported metrics, hidden fees and black-box attribution. Monk explained her firm's stance: "The reason that we took a transparent point of view was so that … we could make sure our clients were confident in our unbiased perspective about where they should spend their media dollars and how much."

What else moved at the summit?

• Creators: Alex Mathieu, head of creative strategy & vp at Open Influence, said "in a saturated marketplace, creators are often the best solution" — but brands should pick creators who've already engaged with their product.
• Creative tech: Laurel Burton, CEO of Instrument, and Crocs CMO Carly Gomez showed how tech sped up the brand's site, social and e-commerce work. Burton's prediction: "Websites are dying" is wrong — they're "the absolute central hub" feeding both consumers and answer engines.
• Retail media: Dentsu's new head of commerce Aisha Khan said consolidation is inevitable but growth continues, with in-store the next growth area. "AI has accelerated this idea of agile MMM, or incrementality — more traditional MMM becoming more sophisticated," she said.
• Outcomes: Morgan Scarnato, chief strategy officer of CourtAvenue Media, described "The Cake" — layered client agreements spanning brand awareness, equity and sales outcomes — while conceding results can't always be measured one to one.

Attendees also flagged a quieter casualty: the brief. "I've seen some of the worst briefs I've ever seen in my career recently … I think AI is making it worse," one said.

The summit's closing choice framed the fork ahead: automate everything and cut humans, or use AI to make experts more efficient. As one speaker put it, full automation without people "is not the right strategy."