Duluth Trading Company is taking the agentic media buying trend and drawing a fairly human boundary: AI agents can handle tasks like bidding and creative iteration management, but anything resembling brand voice, humor, or “ethos” stays closer to people with pulse rates.
Marketing director Ellie Uberto framed it during a live Digiday Podcast recording at Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit, held May 6–8 in Palm Springs: “AI can get you to the finish line and you get to spend all your energy crossing the finish line.”
Duluth isn’t managing the agents itself. Its unnamed agency partner handles agentic bidding on the brand’s behalf. Uberto told Digiday she is less concerned with which models the agency uses or the exact prompts going into the system than with whether the setup makes the team more efficient — moving time away from “building decks or reporting” and toward strategy.
“We’re comfortable with it because we know that our agency knows us very well,” Uberto said. “They understand what our goals and objectives are. They understand all the different pieces that our marketing needs to hit.”
Digiday positions Duluth somewhere between two AI-media-buying camps: marketers embedding agents into buying and optimization, and marketers willing to use AI for brainstorming while keeping decision-making human. Bayer’s Glenniss Richards offered the contrast at the same event, saying the brand’s in-house media team is not ready to trust agents with ad dollars because AI still lacks human nuance.
“It’s making us quicker, faster, certainly more agile, giving us data to digest, consume and inform our media campaigns. But it’s not owning or controlling our campaigns,” Richards said.
The unresolved bits are familiar: where agents belong in the workflow, how agencies get paid when systems automate more of the labor, and how much transparency marketers can expect inside the models. Small questions. Barely anything to worry about.
Full story at Digiday.