Georgia-Pacific Calls Bullshit on Buying Agents: Adtech’s Wasted Summer
It’s a humid Wednesday in mid-August and Paras Shah, senior director of digital media at Georgia-Pacific, just torched half the adtech world from his Midtown office. The punchline? They’re not holding out on buying agents because the tech is too green. They’re holding out because the rest of digital advertising is still a landfill of waste and wishful thinking.
Let’s get real: every LinkedIn ‘AI media buying‘ influencer is still peddling the dream that software will miraculously rescue your bloated, fraud-riddled, viewability-optional media plan. But Shah actually buys at scale. He’s seen what happens when you trust ‘agents’ that optimize against metrics no one can explain—except for the vendors selling them. He’s not impressed. The tech works well enough, he says. The problem is the ecosystem it plugs into: a Rube Goldberg machine of middlemen, hidden fees, and so much inventory you couldn’t track it with three LLMs and a bloodhound.
Let’s talk numbers. The ANA just dropped another “programmatic waste” study this month—reminder: over $20 billion in online ad spend vanishes into fraud, spoofed domains, and ‘optimization fees’ that never leave the spreadsheet. This isn’t the future. It’s Tuesday morning at any holding company trading desk. Georgia-Pacific isn’t shelling out for ‘buying agents’ because, as Shah put it, “waste in the system” is still the baseline, not the exception.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: until agencies and publishers stop treating transparency as a four-letter word, the only AI worth buying is the one that can tell you where the money went. And no, your favorite DSP isn’t going to give you that. The buying agent grift is just the latest way to sell hope to desperate CMOs who haven’t opened a log file since 2018.
If you want to fix this? Stop fetishizing automation and start demanding line-item receipts. Buy less, buy better, and don’t let another week go by without asking your vendors exactly what they’re optimizing for. You’ll be amazed how fast they stop returning your calls.
