By Michael Bürgi  •  March 9, 2026  •

Ivy Liu

The following are excerpts from the two Town Halls, and have been lightly edited for clarity

CHALLENGES

“Often senior [marketing] leadership will say, can AI make our creative? And they don’t really understand what’s going into that. Or they’ll ask why can’t we turn on these Meta Advantage Plus enhancements, which everyone knows look like shit … They’re going to summits and conferences for CMO levels, where they’re hearing about this kind of stuff, and they’re like, oh we should do that. But then they come back and they don’t understand kind of the labor involved, or the problems that some of these tools are creating.”

“Our leadership is all about AI, and has actually really built out a great integration into our system. What I’ve noticed, though really quickly, is the adoption dropped. We now have this powerful tool that can do anything, make you better, faster, smarter, more efficient. But it’s too big for people to understand at the same time, and so nobody’s figuring out how to use it, as weird as that sounds. So it’s either they’re too much all about it or they have no idea how to use it. And this perfect balance doesn’t exist yet.”

“Our creative today is built without creative teams knowing the challenges that media planners and buyers are dealing with in the interfaces. So it’s bringing them into the conversation. We’re working on showing our creative team the challenges that we’re dealing with, so that creative can be built, or at least create a playground for people to create creative that works in that environment. Because creative today doesn’t work with it.”

“I’m having concerns with younger talent coming in, and how to teach them what is right and wrong, if you’re expecting them to just use AI. Because I think that a lot of companies are obviously laying off this doer talent at the bottom of the pool, replacing it with AI. But how do you train people to use AI correctly? And know what to do with it and know what not to do with it? It makes me concerned long term.”

SOLUTIONS

“So to me, it looks like a lunch and learn. CMOs and very high level senior leadership, now more than ever, really need to have more knowledge of how AI can impact their agency and kind of the nitty gritty … The 27 year old media supervisor is the one who’s going to have to use some of these AI tools. Is it her job to also educate? Senior leadership is smart. They can. They can learn this stuff and pick it up. And so while it may not be [the media supervisor’s] job to educate them, I think that there are ways and tools they can reach out. And they can also reach out to people who work under them and say, ‘Hey, what does this look like for you on a day to day basis?’”

“The best thing to do is to show [clients] the dangers. Show them houses on fire in the education so that you’re telling them about the risk. Because you have to show them that you’re thinking about risk. There’s also cyber security risk. There’s all these risks with you using AI. So in that education, it’s showing them the dangers of just using it. And in that process, you build frameworks in terms of, this is what we could do, and you test it. We have clients who are just reckless, and if they’re reckless, you get it in writing in the email, ‘We do not advise this, but because name here has approved it, let’s do it, because these are the risks.”

“We talk about AI with this massive brush, but it’s different to use it for media planning than making creative, which has very different uses than building a new plan. We need to be judicious in terms of how we train ourselves organizationally, in terms of what we are going to use it for — and then pick those spots where it’s going to give you the best results. So if my team comes to me and says, ‘I want to use AI,’ I’m like, tell me why, how it improves the process and how it’s going to make us more efficient.”

“I’ve learned how to not only utilize but show my upper management how we can use AI to help supplement what we already know with our intelligence, with our experience. But make these decisions quicker and with much more care and more detail oriented. I never want to push things on people that know and have a lot more wisdom than me in this industry. But helping people make their day better and easier, that’s something that everyone at every age wants to do. So when I can, I’ve really tried to politely and softly show how it’s helped me and how it’s helped my team and the people underneath me. And it’s been very interesting to see how that’s translated across teams and to my higher ups.”

“The biggest challenge for the leadership team is not focusing on maybe the top five things that AI can do that any given month, week, day, but the top five things that need to get done, and how can AI actually help that. So focusing on the desired business outcomes for the clients, for the agency, and then looking at, well, what has AI made available lately that can make that process easier.”

“Our policy is, you can use AI in future presentations, but when you’re learning to do this, you need to take a stab at it yourself. We can work together to enhance and figure out how do we want to use AI in our business. How does senior leadership factor into that? How we implement it? And then what policies can we implement on entry level talent so that they’re also using their own critical thinking skills?”

Color by numbers

There’s no doubt that generative AI is impacting all corners of our lives, both business and personal. Performance agency Net Conversion did some research to quantify just how much impact is happening, and where it’s being felt — and comparing it to research conducted in 2025. Although consumers appear to feel less pessimistic about the economy (at least at the time of Net Conversion’s research, done the last week of January), 93% said they changed their approach to spending in the past six months. Some details:  

• Almost two-thirds (64%) now use AI tools to research purchases, up from 45%. Of those, 57% say AI grew the number of sources they consult, which indicates they are expanding, not narrowing, their consideration set.
• While 84% of consumers switched brands for value-related reasons, only 34% now say they are less loyal than a year ago, down from 40% in 2025, which suggests brands can still rebuild trust.

Takeoff & landing

• WPP Media named Nancy Hall to be CEO of WPP Media U.S., officially replacing Sharb Farjami, who left last October. Hall most recently was chief client officer for the group, following two years as CEO of Mindshare North America. The holdco also hired Tamina Plum to be its global client president, coming over from Starcom where she was chief growth and operating officer. 
• Stagwell’s Assembly agency built an agentic search aid tool called Stagwell Search+ in partnership with an AI visibility firm called Emberos. The tool is meant to help Stagwell clients with visibility across the AI search landscape — and the company noted one software client saw a 57% visibility lift using it.  
• Havas bought yet another small agency, this time German cultural marketing shop Styleheads, which it will fold into Havas Play, part of Havas Media Network. 
• Account moves: PMG landed Zoom’s media AOR business, the first media agency hire the video platform has made …  Mediaplus International won Chinese auto firm Changan’s media business as it prepares to enter five European markets (Germany, Poland, the U.K., Spain and Italy) and expand further in Europe in 2028 … Horizon Media won winemaker Gallo’s AOR business, including audience development, media planning, buying, and measurement … WPP Media’s EssenceMediacom reupped its media remit for Tesco shopping chain across Eastern Europe. 
• Personnel moves: Cheil’s Attention Arc media agency hired Cate Evans to take on a new role of svp of media strategy, coming over from Havas Media Network where she was svp and group strategy director … Assembly hired Aruna Natarajan to be chief client officer for North America, coming over from WPP Media where she was COO …  Full service agency Strawberry Frog promoted Steve Scutellaro to CEO from GM. 

Direct quote

“AI is like fire — it could be used to cook food or it could be used to burn your house down.”

— Lavall Chichester, svp of SEO and AI optimization, BarkleyOKRP/MissionOne Media, speaking at the Media Buying Summit.

Speed reading

• A few stories came out of onstage conversations at Digiday’s Media Buying Summit last week. Sam Bradley dug into the thinning wall that used to separate organic and paid search, thanks to AI’s impact. And I encapsulated comments by Omnicom Media’s North American CEO Ralph Pardo in the summit’s opening keynote conversation. 
• Seb Joseph chronicled how Publicis Groupe’s Epsilon can do things no LLM can replicate, thanks to the way the holding company developed it. 
• Joseph and Kimeko McCoy also queried several advertisers about whether they believe WPP can convince them its restructuring will help them deliver on marketing goals.