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Episode from The Media Buying Podcast. Summarised by the AffHouse newsroom from the full episode. How we work →
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Programmatic media buying is crowded with intermediaries, and AI is changing both how ads are bought and where readers go. Industry veteran Bob Regular explains what a clean supply path looks like, why he expects AI to take over buying more slowly than people think, and how AI is hurting publishers. He speaks with host Jim Banks on The Media Buying Podcast.
In this episode
Regular expects AI tools to "do the buying and do the optimizing", less like operating a 747 and more like autopilot, but says it will take a lot more time than we give it credit for (12:23, 12:50, 13:20).
His clean supply path: work only directly with publishers and auction proprietary placements, a very transparent direct path with very few taking a cut in the middle and "a fair auction" (19:07, 20:37, 20:43).
His company secures only the highest-performing placement on a publisher, across more than 20,000 domains (19:58, 21:10).
He says going direct is not as simple as cutting out the middle: it is the right placement, time, location and behavior, "a multidimensional problem" (27:34, 27:42).
He says publishers are "really taking it on the chin": AI has cut referral traffic from search and pulled time into ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude (29:43, 29:54, 30:07).
He says agentic AI as a buying method "is gonna require a tremendous amount of trust" (40:36).
Episode from The Media Buying Podcast with Jim Banks and Rob Adler, published on YouTube.
