On Agentic Marketing with Art Tauder // BRXND Dispatch vol 119
An interview with Art about the enduring importance of communciations, what previous platform shifts can teach us about AI and why "no agent will go out looking for Coca-Cola"
One more early bird call for BRXND NYC 2026 before many of you ship off to La Croisette next week. Early bird tickets are $749 through July 15 before we raise prices to $999+ for GA.
If you’d like to attend the show, you can still add your name to the early bird waitlist.
We have a lot of demand and only 378 seats in the Times Center so we’re prioritizing brand-side marketers. If you work at an agency, we ask you just bring a client along. Drop me a note at mike@brxnd.ai and we’ll handle the details.
Interview with Art Tauder, 65-year veteran of Madison Avenue
Art Tauder started his career on Madison Avenue in 1961, a almost the exact timestamp when Don Draper was presenting “the carousel” to Kodak to cap Mad Men‘s inaugural season. But by then Art had already been clocking hours in advertising for fourteen years, filing tear sheets at his father Milton’s agency starting at age seven. Sixty-five years later he’s still in the game, working exclusively on communications strategy for innovations that can disrupt major industries and improve the quality of life for individuals and society as a whole.
Across a thirty-five-year career at IPG, Art built the strategic planning system that directed more than 1,000 operating companies across 130 countries, servicing the likes of Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé, and General Motors. He architected the transformation of 95-year-old McCann-Erickson into the McCann WorldGroup, which earned #1 Global Agency of the Year honors from both Ad Age and Adweek in 2000, and personally acquired the ThunderHouse trademark for IPG for $1 million before getting it back as a retirement gift.
He served as a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab, the go-to person for technology transfer into marketing communications, right as the internet was finding its footing in the wake of the dot-com bust. Today he’s advocating for a “New Age Communications WorldGroup,” built on the premise that agentic AI is the next great inflection in marketing.
Along the way, he gave a renegade twenty-year-old kid his first taste of the advertising business from his studio twenty-two stories above Central Park South. We’ve been good friends ever since.
I caught up with Art to talk about the cycles he’s seen, why this era will be defined by what he calls “agentic marketing,” and what sixty-five years in the business can teach a generation of CMOs navigating the way AI is reshaping how consumers build preference and choose brands.
On how agents will force agencies to rediscover the art of communications
Mike: Let’s start with the punchline. You’ve started calling this era “agentic marketing,” and you think that somewhat paradoxically, the agentic era will take the marketing business back to its roots in communications.
Talk to me a little bit about what you mean.
Art: Everybody’s transfixed by generative AI: the cost savings, the chatbot that writes the copy. That’s the least of it.
What’s actually coming is that every marketer is going to have to talk to a buyer’s agent — and somebody is going to have to teach them how. That’s not a media-buying problem. It’s a communications problem.
It’s the communications problem of this era. And while we’re at it—as a communications guy, I’ll tell you the technologists are terrible at branding their own work. “AI,” artificial intelligence, is an awful label for the computational augmentation of human intelligence. What the hell is artificial about it?
“’AI’ is an awful label for the computational augmentation of human intelligence. What the hell is artificial about it?”
Mike: We’ll unpack all of that. But first I have to establish something, because you may be the only person still active in the game who can say this with a straight face.
You’ve watched this exact movie play out three times already across platform shifts in television, internet, and now AI……..
Art: Let me give you a quick look at “the cycles” I’ve lived, because it’s where I’m coming from. In grammar school in the mid-1940s, I took printing as a practical subject, like wood shop, and with my father’s encouragement I became quite good at setting type by hand.
I could even run a letterpress. There was a Linotype machine in that shop, and early on I marveled at it — that’s where my interest in the impact of innovation on communications began. In 1947 I was in a TV commercial, before sound and sync cameras were widely used; I remember it like it was yesterday, the video and audio recorded in separate sessions and then synched together.
At my first job, at BBDO in 1962, the standard units for television were sixty-second and ten-second black-and-white commercials. And then color. And so on and so on, right up until agentic marketing today.
Net-net: I’ve seen over and over again how innovations in technology have disrupted the marketing communications business — and how significant innovation powers growth for both clients and their communications agencies.
Mike: So walk me back to the glory years of the business. Where did the holding companies come from — and what were they actually built to do?
Art: After World War II you had this tremendous need to build out internationally. Coca-Cola gets introduced into Japan and into Europe by the GIs — who the hell is going to manage the communications?
So Interpublic, the granddaddy of these companies, was formed in 1960, riding on the back of Coca-Cola. Exxon, Nestlé, Unilever — these companies all had to have a communications partner all over the world. And they divided themselves up into what were almost club agencies. Coca-Cola’s club agency was Interpublic. Pepsi’s was BBDO. General Motors was Interpublic. Ford’s major agency was J. Walter Thompson. And you couldn’t have all your eggs in one basket — if something went rotten, you needed a second global agency to take the overflow. So there was a logic to having at least three of these global companies.
The thing to understand is the core competence of the holding company is the communications business. This is a business of strategy, directed messaging, and media. Coca-Cola is in the beverage business — actually the refreshment business — and that’s their core expertise.
Having your hand on the pulse of the audience, developing the messages, and directing them into the right media — that’s the core business. It was grown by real communications leaders. Marion Harper & Paul Foley at McCann/Interpublic, Dan Seymour, Bert Manning at J. Walter Thompson. Ed Ney and Peter Georgescu at Young & Rubicam. Client-driven people.
Mike: And then 1986 happens and Sorrell swoops in
Art: Then Martin Sorrell saw how much weakness there was in the management succession of these very big agencies — David Ogilvy with no obvious heir, J. Walter Thompson up for grabs — and he did a financial roll-up.
He was never really focused on being an agent for the client; he was an agent for himself. The easiest, fastest money was on the media side, in arbitrage — what they now call principal media, where you buy at one price and sell at another. But here’s the thing: the underlying need never went away. Clients still needed a communications partner, and a global one. The holding companies just stopped leading — they lost the innovation edge to the hyperscalers, to Facebook and Google and Amazon and Microsoft — and that’s when the thing began to dissolve.
On what every platform shift teaches
Mike: You’ve worked through three of the biggest disruptions in the history of communications — television maturing, the internet becoming a marketing platform, and now AI. What do the first two teach us about this one?
Art: Two things. First, innovation doesn’t advance in a straight line. There are bursts of advancement, expectations overheat, and then there’s a slump before it picks up again. Everybody’s jumping on these investments in AI right now, and if they don’t start delivering revenue and profit, there’s going to be a trough. You have to be prepared for it. The ebbs and flows that come with innovation can be mitigated with a well-thought-out strategic vision.
Second, you have to understand the true nature and value of innovation. With television, it was amplifying communications by unleashing video. With the internet, it was amplifying the power of information by transforming analog to digital. With AI, and the evolving iteration of agentic AI — if you aim high — it can be amplifying the power of human intelligence to improve the quality of life of individuals and society as a whole.
Mike: One observation of yours that I keep coming back to is I ponder how this era will play out for marketers is around what has happened every time in history that consumers have gotten more options…..
Art: Every time you give the consumer the power of choice — the freedom to take charge — they take it. When we had three television channels, we were all watching the same three. Then we had five. Then UHF came in and we had more, and more. And the more channels we got, the more these consumers would go for the choice, pick out exactly what they wanted.
The internet was supposed to empower the consumer that way, but it really never happened, because the internet got controlled by the hyperscalers — and in the two or three biggest cases, they are the media, totally driven by advertising revenue.
Every time you give the consumer the power of choice and the freedom to take charge, they take it.
Mike: You were at the MIT Media Lab during the hyperscale era of the internet that feels like the closest historical rhyme to this moment. What was the energy then and how does it translate to now?
Art: The thought-leaders at the MIT Media Lab envisioned the disruption coming — the convergence of computer, publishing, and broadcasting, the move from analog to digital — and they prospered, in reputation and in funding, by leading the exploration of it.
The money pouring into AI infrastructure today signals a disruption of the same magnitude. The lesson from the Media Lab is the same one as always: you stay ahead of the innovation, or you become roadkill.
On marketing to agents
Mike: Let’s define our terms, because you draw a hard line between agentic commerce — which McKinsey pegs as a $3–5 trillion industry by 2030 — and agentic marketing. What’s the distinction?
Art: The too-simple answer is: agentic marketing is the application of agentic AI to the marketing function. But the definitions matter, so let me be precise. I define agentic AI as the autonomous or semi-autonomous representative of an individual or entity undertaking one or more computational processes to complete a desired task.
And I define agentic marketing as the use of an autonomous or semi-autonomous agent — representing a buyer, a seller, or a channel of distribution — in the process of moving a product from production to consumption.
Mike: Make that concrete. What does it actually mean for a marketer day to day?
Art: Think of it as two sides of a coin. On one side, the marketer is going to have to talk to a buyer’s agent. Somebody has to help that marketer with their content, their marketing, their communications, so they can communicate with other agents — so your materials are put together by your agent in a way that matches up easily with the agent of the buyer. And that opens up all kinds of opportunity.
The other side is the buyer’s agent itself. In my own work I’ve been building a model of one — and, believe it or not, I named the project Uschi, after my wife Ursula’s nickname.
Mike: We were working on this personal shopper concept together way back in 2014!
Right, the fundamental idea is the same. Uschi’s my perfect agent. She represents me in a myriad of transactions. Agents will vary business to consumer, business to business and by industry— the agent buying your groceries is different from the one negotiating a business transaction on your behalf — but that’s really what an agent is: the person who, in this world, could most represent you, other than yourself.
“That’s really what an agent is: the person who, in this world, could most represent you — other than yourself.“
Mike: A lot of the early dialogue here is honestly pretty boring — structuring your product feeds and blog posts so an agent can parse them. That feels like the floor, not the ceiling.
Art: Exactly. That’s scratching the tiniest bit of it. The agents are not going to be hyper-rational entities you simply format yourself for. You’re going to have to match up with them — and that means the same thing it’s always meant in this business: they’re going to have to be persuasive.
On why most marketing leaders think too small
Mike: Aristotle shows up a lot in your work — specifically the line that “our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but rather that we aim too low and hit.” What’s the low aim you see most often in marketing today?
Art: I see it as two-pronged. The first is an excessive focus on generative AI. The obvious allure — functional proficiency, cost savings — is masking the bigger picture of a 25-year-plus evolution of AI that’s now in a period of rapid acceleration, way in advance of revenue and profit. Leaders have to cultivate the ability to see beyond the present hot iteration. They need to lead the visioning process.
The second is the lack of a bold, aspirational mission. The true mission is to grow the value of clients with communications that influence attitudes and behavior. Sustainable growth is the number one challenge of every organization, and communications is the primary means to grow value.
Mike: In that vein, you’ve named two specific psychological barriers that keep getting in the way of AI adoption. And the wild part is you watched them block AI inside the industry years before ChatGPT existed.
Art: Back in 2015 and 2016 I was working on an AI platform branded Peer-Sourcing to develop communications strategy — using AI to get information directly from your customer base that a focus group can’t. The focus group is a 75+ year old methodology; the interaction between respondents in fifteen minutes outweighs the actual question, and everybody in the room comes with a bias — the interviewer, the research company, the client, the brand people. What you need is a clear path to the customer. So we were already using natural language processing, summarization, and generative AI to capture an input, synthesize it, and generate a communications concept off of it. In 2015 and 2016.
(Author’s Note: If you’re a brand leader reading this and the above paragraph piqued your interest, highly suggest you check out Listen Labs who is building in this space. I have zero connection to the company but I’m really impressed by what they’ve done and think they’ll be one of the most significant AI companies that sells into brand leaders)
And we couldn’t sell it. We couldn’t sell it because the people making the decisions said, “That’s what I do — you’re telling me you’re going to run a process that eliminates me.” That’s the innovator’s dilemma, Clayton Christensen’s idea: the very structure, processes, and tools that lead to an established organization’s success naturally inhibit change.
Then we took it to Adobe, and the head of development and ventures told me, “That’s not in my swimming lane — we don’t do strategy.” That’s textbook marketing myopia, Theodore Levitt’s term — looking at what you do in a limited way, that’s Coca-Cola thinking it’s in the cola business instead of the refreshment business. As I told Peer-Spurcing prospects at the time, quoting Sun Tzu: tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Mike: I love this marketing myopia concept. Is that at the core of what is hobbling the largest marketing organizations in the world right now?
Art: Precisely. The holding companies in particular have marketing myopia, and it’s gotten worse at the exact moment they need to think bigger. Instead of broadening their focus, WPP and the others narrowed it ever since they went public and the leadership weakened — they zeroed in on the easiest place to make money rather than the client’s actual communications need. And that communications need runs across all of a client’s stakeholders, and it varies by industry. It’s not just the consumer and the people who influence the consumer — it’s the workforce, if your workforce isn’t up to speed you’ll lose the business; it’s the channel, the supply chain, the community, the investors, the government. They have to open up and widen their scope, because it’s all communications, it’s all strategy, it’s all sending messages.
Right now WPP is competing with Publicis on the basis of media and technology strength. What kind of bullshit is that? Who’s going to do the better media? Media as we know it is not what these clients are going to need. It’s yesterday’s definition. If you don’t think bigger, you’re going to miss the whole damn agentic marketing situation.
On the things an agent will never search for the work that comes next
Mike: This is where it gets really interesting to me. If agents start mediating purchases, what kind of brands are particularly vulnerable and how can they respond.?
Art: No agent is going to go out looking for Coca-Cola. There’s no way. So there’s a principle here: a brand has to enhance the quality of life of its customers in related areas — it has to earn its place in their lives every day. Coca-Cola has to be in the consumer’s mind all the time as a refreshment, a meal accompaniment, a social icebreaker.
How does it survive in an agentic environment? It reaches out and experientially touches its users, and not through the traditional means of media. It does things for its customer base that they can’t do for themselves.
Mike: This sounds like the fundamental raison d’etre of the marketing function…
Art: Take an everyday consumer product — something in personal care, say. You have to ask the same question: what can you do for that customer, relevant to your product, that will enhance their life? Maybe it’s their health, maybe it’s their appearance. What do these people need, and what can you do for them that would ingratiate them to you? That’s part of selling them the product. They’ll still do certain big events where their media presence matters, but they have to get attention and do something meaningful for their customer base every single day.
That’s the challenge the holding company was built to solve — and it’s the opposite of competing on who buys the cheapest media or what technology platforms to use.
Mike: If you had to compress sixty-five years in the business into a single piece of advice for somebody in marketing trying to navigate the agentic shift
Art: Relentlessly focus on innovation. Better yet, be the best advocate for innovation in your core competence. Create a vision of how it will impact you and your customer base. That’s how I got to the MIT Media Lab in the first place; hell it’s the same path you’re on that’s led you to work on Zero Clicks and now BRXND.
Don’t succumb to marketing myopia– aim high. As Aswath Damodaran, the dean of valuations at NYU, puts it: narrations drive valuations. Success will come to those who take the lead in the exploration. That’s especially true for anyone in the communications business, because the story is the core competence. This is communications in the age of artificial intelligence. Call it the New Age.
The companies that remember communications was always the business — and that it has to be again — are the ones that get to be something far bigger than a place that spends advertising dollars.
Art Tauder is a 65 year veteran of the communications business who built the strategic planning system that directed more than 1,000 operating companies across 130 countries for Interpublic, servicing the likes of Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestlé, and General Motors. He can be reached at art@thunderhouse.org.
If you have any questions, please be in touch. As always, thanks for reading.
— Mike