“Being able to be the bridge between the walled gardens and the open web, that’s really important,” says Andy MacLeay, VP of engagement and channels at Fluency, speaking with The Drum as part of our Media that Moves video series at Advertising Week New York.
It set the tone for a conversation focused on operational clarity in a rapidly changing digital landscape. As media moves faster than ever, marketers face a growing challenge: fragmented ecosystems, each playing by their own rules.
The goal, MacLeay explains, isn’t to stack on more tools but to simplify. “You could, of course, use the other point solutions,” he says. “But just make sure that you’re not adding more complexity by embracing something that’s supposed to make you more efficient.”
That starts with building smarter workflows, connecting fragmented ecosystems and using AI with guardrails. “When your workflows are clean, your media dollars work harder,” he says.
But as new ad formats and channels proliferate, the pressure to move fast brings both upside and risk. “It can be a double-edged sword,” says MacLeay. “You’re doing a new thing, you have to manage new pieces around that, but you’ve got the benefit of that potentially opening up incremental revenue and finding performance gains in these new formats.”
The key, he says, is to “use automation in an intelligent way” to test and scale without adding operational weight, anchoring everything in a digital advertising operating system that “uses data to power your advertising.”
Looking ahead, MacLeay believes the real acceleration is still to come. “I do think that we're going to see a continued push towards AI and intelligent automation,” he says. And as enterprise-grade AI is used more widely, “the good technical teams [will] begin to filter out some of that, find that source of truth and lean into agents to help people in their everyday processes.”
Watch the full conversation to hear MacLeay’s perspective on how marketers can build the bridge, break the walls, and seize the opportunities hiding in complexity.
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Fluency is the first Digital Advertising Operating System (OS) that transforms paid media operations challenges into breakthrough outcomes by centralizing all major...