Scott Ensign on how sell-side decisioning brings media owners and buyers closer together
Welcome to Innovators Unscripted, a series where we share unfiltered insights from some of the most disruptive voices in today’s advertising ecosystem. Scott Ensign, chief strategy officer at Butler/Till, joins for a conversation about the value of agentic AI in programmatic advertising, how sell-side decisioning brings the buy and sell sides closer together, and how curation helps protect quality in categories like pharma.
Here are the takeaways that stuck with us.
Agentic AI is tackling some of programmatic’s oldest challenges
For years, programmatic advertising has grappled with slow manual processes and fragmented supply paths. That’s changing, in large part, thanks to the rise of agentic AI.
“More than any other channel or method of buying, programmatic is really primed for a huge revolution in the way we think about it, the way we execute it, optimize it, and measure it.”
Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer
Butler/Till
Scott believes agentic AI is creating opportunities for Butler/Till to develop new products and deliver stronger efficiency and outcomes for its clients. For example, his team built a dedicated agent for supply path optimization (SPO) that evaluates every SSP the agency buys through and surfaces the strongest path to a given impression. Traders spend less time looking for the most efficient, direct path and more time on strategy.
Other manual workflows are seeing the same benefits from agentic AI. Media buying used to require emailing RFPs to a handful of media owners and waiting days for a response. Agentic AI automates and shortens that workflow down to a matter of seconds, the same speed gain Butler/Till is seeing with its SPO agent.
Sell-side decisioning then creates another opportunity to put that intelligence to work. Because decisioning happens on the sell side, closer to the impression itself, buyers get an unfiltered view of all available supply along with more direct paths to the impressions that matter. This only strengthens marketers’ SPO strategies.
Sell-side decisioning brings media owners and buyers closer together
The infrastructure that powers programmatic advertising has traditionally kept intelligence downstream on the buy side, unintentionally creating layers of distance between media buyers and media owners. Sell-side decisioning is changing that, applying the same kind of logic and optimization upstream on the sell side while enhancing DSP decisioning with more efficient scale, richer signals, and better precision. For independent agencies like Butler/Till, that means deepening relationships with media owners and SSPs like Index and complementing DSPs’ optimization to drive stronger outcomes.
“The closer you are to [an] impression, the more direct your path is going to be. You’re not going to have things like reselling and hops and obfuscated inventory.”
Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer
Butler/Till
This ultimately gives media buyers more relevant bid opportunities, stronger match rates, and campaigns that perform better.
Sell-side decisioning and curation are key to ensuring quality for sectors like pharma
Pharma, a sector where quality is paramount because of regulations, makes up roughly half of Butler/Till’s business. The brands Butler/Till works with lean heavily on high-end, endemic inventory, and that kind of supply is scarce.
“Programmatic offers us the opportunity to do things like really, really smart curation, where we can package data and high-quality inventory and then leverage a lot of the benefits of programmatic.”
Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer
Butler/Till
Sell-side decisioning helps Butler/Till navigate that scarcity more efficiently, curating high-quality inventory and layering in the flexibility, addressability, and measurability that only programmatic can offer. It’s why the agency was an early curation adopter, well before it became a common industry approach. And because sell-side decisioning gives media buyers full visibility into all available supply, Butler/Till can find that scarce inventory more effectively.
Quality is a shared responsibility between media owners and buyers
Scott views quality as something that media owners can’t fix alone. As he notes, the current state of advertising on the open internet is a direct reflection of what media buyers are willing to pay for.
“You’re kind of going to get the internet that you deserve at a certain point. And so, what we fund and what we monetize is what is going to be created.”
Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer
Butler/Till
Quality has to work both ways, with media buyers and media owners collaborating. Otherwise, the open internet won’t improve for anyone. Scott points to the industry’s fixation on raw efficiency and per-unit cost as a case where that balance has broken down, incentivizing low-quality supply that doesn’t benefit anyone, especially consumers. Yet, he is optimistic that emerging technology like AI can help solve that problem, giving the industry a real opportunity to create better advertising experiences.
See how sell-side decisioning is bringing media buyers and media owners closer together, one impression at a time.
