72% of Media Buying Summit Voters Rejected Principal Media

Seventy-two percent of attendees at Digiday's Media Buying Summit voted against principal media, in a live debate that opened the October event and exposed the industry's most contested business model. Principal media places agencies on both sides of the investment equation, buying and selling inventory for and to their own clients.

Kamran Asghar, CEO of Crossmedia, argued the practice has corrupted the meaning of "agency." His verdict was blunt: "Just because it exists doesn't mean you should use it. A little like a nuclear bomb, or AI." Forrester vp and senior agency analyst Jay Pattisall countered that principal media survives at holding companies with the scale to run it — provided clients get sufficient transparency. "It's here, it's not going anywhere… so if you're going to do it, do it well," Pattisall said.

What did the summit say about AI costs?

The edit team's opening themes flagged AI as both inevitable and dangerous: agentic buying, planning, AEO/GEO and client consulting are compressing timelines, while token usage and insufficient ROI demand human oversight of anything touching client budgets.

Tony Russo, vp of AI innovation and strategy at Mile Meter, described a sharp shift since the start of the year. "You saw these massive companies doing token maxxing, spending hundreds of millions of dollars… but it's not an open spigot anymore," he said. Christina Riccitelli, chief innovation and analytics officer at OpAd Media, said much of her agency's AI work remains internal while it works out how to monetize and eventually disclose it: "I think it's important for everyone to kind of know how the sauce is made."

David Dweck, president of Go Fish Digital, warned that anyone building an agentic platform atop Meta or Google "is going to be years behind," and said his firm strips DSP and supply-side layers so agents can buy higher-quality inventory at lower cost.

Are agencies neglecting human talent?

M+C Saatchi CEO Nadja Bellan-White warned of over-engineering. "We forgot the humanization factor. And oftentimes, what I'm seeing now is an over-reliance on artificial intelligence," she said, adding: "AI can be a good sparring partner… but you need to be the one to make the decision." She urged old-school training: juniors should "run at briefs without an over dependency on AI tools."

Gila Wilensky, evp and head of data and media, North America at Monks, predicted a new full-time role of "AI checkers" — careers comparable to journalism's old fact-checkers. Her framing: "AI cannot take risks. That's always going to be our job. AI is not creative."

Attendees also reported a decline in brief quality, blaming AI for disjointed documents with no through line between marketing and business goals. One summed up the risk starkly: an unchecked AI bot could spend $10 million in a DSP instead of $10,000.

What does transparency look like now?

Alison Monk, founder and CEO of Eden Collective, said she de-emphasized buying so clients could trust "our unbiased perspective about where they should spend their media dollars and how much." Her session with Underdog's Devin Bellamy tackled blind platform algorithms, self-reported metrics and black-box attribution that trigger knee-jerk budget pivots.

On creators, Alex Mathieu, head of creative strategy and vp at Open Influence, said: "In a saturated marketplace, creators are often the best solution" — but only when they already fit the brand authentically. Laurel Burton, CEO of Instrument, predicted websites are not dying but becoming "the absolute central hub" feeding both consumers and answer engines, alongside Crocs CMO Carly Gomez.

Dentsu's new head of commerce Aisha Khan said retail media consolidation is inevitable but growth will continue, with in-store the next expansion area and AI accelerating agile MMM and incrementality measurement.

Which fork should agencies take?

CourtAvenue Media chief strategy officer Morgan Scarnato described "The Cake," a layered outcomes model spanning awareness, equity and sales — while admitting outcomes rarely map one to one. He also advised staff to update their resumes every six months.

The closing themes left agencies at two forks: full automation that eliminates humans, or efficiency that amplifies experts. "If I was working at an organization that's going for full automation and limiting humans, I would be scared," one attendee said — the summit's clearest signal that humans must stay at the center as AI spending discipline tightens.