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There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to agent media buying. Some people are moving to the so-called cutting edge by embedding AI agents into processes such as ad buying and creative optimization. Still others have drawn a line in the sand by allowing AI agents to brainstorm but leave decision-making to humans. Duluth Trading Company has a square shape in the middle of it.
“AI will get you to the finish line, and you can spend all your energy getting you over the finish line,” said Ellie Uberto, Duluth’s director of marketing. She spoke during a live recording of the Digiday Podcast hosted during Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit event May 6-8 in Palm Springs, California.
At this point in the AI hype cycle, the debate is not focused on whether an AI agent belongs in a program workflow, but rather on how much control the agent has within the process.
For Duluth, that means handing over tasks like bidding and creative iteration management to AI agents. Meanwhile, Uberto said the brand’s voice, sense of humor and overall Duluth brand ethos is kept close to home under more human scrutiny.
When it comes to the agent ad buying process, our agency partners in Duluth manage agent bidding on behalf of brands. Mr. Uberto did not disclose the names of the agency partners.
“We feel safe because our agency knows us well,” Uberto told Digiday. “They understand our goals and objectives. They understand all the different parts of what our marketing needs to accomplish.”
It’s a question of trust. According to Uberto, Duluth is less interested in choosing the exact prompts that agency partners give to their AI agents or the exact AI models that agencies are using. Rather, Uberto is interested in how agent systems can help brands become more efficient, allowing them to spend more time on strategy rather than building decks and reporting, she said.
Based on extensive conversations at DPMS this year, Duluth may be further along than claimed. In contrast, Glenys Richards, Bayer’s senior director of digital media activation, said the company and its internal media team are not yet ready to hand over ad spend to an AI agent because AI is generally unable to provide the nuance that humans can.
“It makes us faster, faster and certainly more agile, giving us the data to digest, consume and inform our media campaigns. But it doesn’t own or control our campaigns,” Richards said at DPMS.
Exactly where agent systems fit into programmatic advertising workflows remains a matter of debate, as marketers consider issues such as agency compensation models and transparency within the model. But what is clear is that agents are moving beyond low-hanging fruit tasks like brainstorming campaigns and summarizing insights.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.