Goodway Group

Deciding What AI Should Never Control in Advertising

Eric Picard of Fluency argues that while LLMs and AI agents will become part of advertising workflows, the industry must clearly define what parts of campaign operations AI must never control. He warns that LLMs are probabilistic and therefore unsuitable for making irreversible budgetary or execution decisions without human-in-the-loop governance. Picard outlines three lessons from running automated advertising at scale: platform APIs do not teach operational wisdom, governance must be encoded into automation from the start, and the most valuable automation scales a buyer’s strategic thinking while keeping deterministic execution for money-moving systems.

Agentic AI vs Supply-Path Optimization in Media Buying

Andrea Kwiatek, director of strategic partnerships at independent agency Goodway Group, told AdExchanger that while the industry is excited about agentic AI, supply-path optimization (SPO) remains a practical priority. Goodway Group is testing agentic media-buying agents by feeding them campaign briefs to compare buyer and seller agent recommendations and to verify whether agents can be constrained to approved buying paths. Kwiatek stressed the need for transparency, rigorous partner validation, and third-party verification to ensure AI-driven buying does not become another opaque black box. The interview highlights agency responsibilities to vet partners and protect client outcomes while experimenting with new agentic infrastructure.

Retail Media's Reckoning: Who Holds the Power?

The Drum’s Current Accountability episode argues retail media has entered a new phase: the rapid, easy growth is over and power is fragmenting among retailers, platforms and brands. Industry leaders warn many retail media networks are reaching onsite saturation, AI is reshaping product discovery (threatening retailer-dependent traffic), and networks must prove differentiation to capture brand budgets. Measurement and speed-to-action remain urgent problems—executives cite the need for objective cross-network measurement and a damaging "data-to-action" delay. Several companies describe efforts to unite brand and commerce media (connected commerce) to own the funnel end-to-end. The episode frames future growth as contingent on accountability, adaptability and rethinking where value is created across the commerce-media ecosystem.