I started this newsletter mostly to force myself to keep up with all the new AI marketing news. Things are moving fast! I figured other people might want to learn about it too, so here we are. If there are topics or companies you’d like me to cover, please send them over. I’m a team of one person, so I’ll do what I can. If you want to connect, you can find me running the fractional CMO arm of Foxtown Marketing on most days.

Welcome to today's edition of AI Marketing Geek, your daily dose of the latest AI developments, tools, trends, and actionable insights shaping marketing in 2026. As AI shifts from experimental hype to pragmatic, ROI-driven reality, we're seeing agentic AI take center stage. Autonomous agents are handling media buying, personalization, and commerce, which is wild to watch.

Story 1: The Trade Desk Is Building AI Campaign Creation With Claude. And Simultaneously Under Fire From Publicis.

The most consequential programmatic advertising story of the month is actually two stories happening to the same company at the same time, and together they tell you something important about where the industry is heading.

Start with the AI side. The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green disclosed at the Marketecture Live conference in New York on March 11 that the company is running a closed beta allowing some advertisers to create programmatic campaigns through Anthropic's Claude. He argued programmatic advertising is uniquely suited to automation: "I don't think there is an industry in the world that is more conducive to AI than programmatic advertising. We are looking at 20 million ad impression opportunities every single second, representing millions of ad campaigns and billions of users on the other side, and we have 10 milliseconds or less."

The beta allows advertisers to describe campaign objectives in natural language, and Claude translates those instructions into programmatic campaign configurations on The Trade Desk's Kokai platform. This lowers the expertise barrier for smaller advertisers while potentially speeding up execution for agencies managing multiple campaigns.

Then, one week later, the transparency battle erupted. Publicis confirmed to Adweek that it sent a memo to select clients advising them to stop working with The Trade Desk after the DSP failed an independent audit conducted by FirmDecisions. The audit found that The Trade Desk "improperly applied their DSP fee to other fees" and billed clients for tools they were automatically opted into without evidence of authorization. Publicis also said The Trade Desk failed to provide the auditor with information necessary to validate that media and data costs were invoiced at cost without markup.

The Trade Desk denied all of it. And now Omnicom has launched its own audit. The latest audit follows word that Publicis had advised clients to stop using The Trade Desk. Dentsu and WPP had previously and quietly exited The Trade Desk's OpenPath program over similar transparency concerns. Three of the four largest holding companies have now distanced themselves from The Trade Desk or its supply-path initiatives within the span of a single month.

The irony here is hard to miss. The Trade Desk is building AI tools to make programmatic more accessible and transparent while simultaneously fighting accusations that its existing fee structures are opaque. Both things can be true at once. But for any marketer evaluating their DSP relationships right now, this is a good week to review your contract and audit rights.

A research report from Madison and Wall dropped last week that quantifies something most performance marketers already feel in their day-to-day work but rarely see expressed as a hard number.

U.S. advertisers will push $57 billion through AI-powered platforms this year, a 63% jump, while the 88% of spend still managed by humans is growing at just 5%. Performance Max and Advantage+ are doing most of the work, automating targeting, bidding, and budgets with minimal human input. And while advertisers keep insisting they value transparency, Madison and Wall found almost no evidence of anyone choosing control when performance was on the table.

This is the defining tension of advertising in 2026. Marketers say they want transparency and control. Their actual budget allocations say they want results. The platforms that deliver results through automation are winning, even as the industry argues loudly about visibility into how those decisions get made.

The underlying shift is that AI platforms are not just capturing intent at the bottom of the funnel. They are influencing how recommendations are interpreted within the same interaction. Organic visibility in AI media establishes credibility and shapes the narrative around a brand, while paid media amplifies and reinforces that narrative. When the two are aligned, they improve performance. When they are not, the inconsistency is immediately visible.

The 63% growth number matters for a practical reason beyond the headline: it tells you that the floor has shifted for what counts as competent advertising. A team still doing primarily manual campaign management is not just behind the curve, they are operating with a structural performance disadvantage against competitors who have handed the bidding and targeting layer to automation. The human edge has moved upstream, into strategy, creative, brand positioning, and brief quality. That is where the work now needs to concentrate.

The Publicis-Trade Desk audit story raises something every advertiser with significant programmatic spend should look at, regardless of which DSP they use. Here are three specific things worth checking.

First, find your audit rights clause. Most master services agreements with DSPs include a provision allowing you or your agency to audit fee structures and billing. Check whether that right belongs to you directly or runs through the agency. If it runs through the agency, you may not have independent visibility into whether fees are being applied correctly. The move toward bringing those contracts in-house, directly between client and platform, is increasingly being recommended by independent advisors.

Second, review your tool opt-ins. The specific finding in the Publicis audit was that clients were opted into platform features and charged for them without documented authorization. Pull up your DSP account settings and look at what add-on products or tools are currently active. If any of them appeared automatically and you cannot find where you approved them, that is worth flagging with your platform rep for documentation.

Third, understand how your data costs are validated. The audit also found that the DSP could not demonstrate media and data costs were passed through at cost without markup. If you are buying data segments or using data enrichment features inside a DSP, ask for documentation of the underlying cost. Not all platforms will provide it, but the ask itself signals that you are paying attention, and that changes the dynamic.

2026 is the year AI moves from "cool demos" to real and measurable business use cases. Expect more agentic tools, voice-powered targeting, and a focus on privacy-first data.

Stay ahead of the game by treating your AI reputation like your website. It would behoove you to make your brand easy for agents to understand and cite.

What AI experiment are you running this week? Reply and let me know. I'll feature top stories in future editions! (Everybody loves a good story)

Stay sharp,
Jon
@mistersterling
Chief AI Marketing Geek