AI Insiders with Eric Picard: How to Safely Scale Agents across your Advertising
Welcome to this special partner edition of AI Insiders by Marketecture's AI Marketers Guild featuring:
Eric Picard, SVP, Product at Fluency
Agentic advertising is already here, but...can you really trust it to run your advertising operations? While LLMs are brilliant, their probabilistic nature is a risk when real dollars are on the line. Eric Picard explains why AdOps requires deterministic execution over mere AI intelligence.
You'll learn:
The missing link: Why a governance layer is critical for turning AI reasoning into reliable, on-brand execution.
Safety at scale: Best practices for integrating agentic AI into enterprise workflows without losing control.
Human-centric automation: How to shift your team from manual tasks to high-level strategy using rule-governed agents.
About the speaker:
Eric Picard is one of the founding architects of the modern programmatic advertising industry, with nearly three decades of experience building the infrastructure, standards, and companies that define how digital media works today.
Picard co-authored the first industry standard for the ad impression and served on the Executive Committee of the IAB Tech Lab Board of Directors. He invented Programmatic Curation through his startup Rare Crowds — a concept now recognized as one of the most significant strategic shifts in the contemporary advertising ecosystem — which was acquired by MediaMath in 2014.
His career spans the full arc of digital advertising’s evolution. He founded Bluestreak in 1997, one of the earliest ad technology companies, and later authored Microsoft’s ad technology strategy while serving on the deal teams for seven adtech acquisitions and as one of three principals in the landmark Microsoft-Yahoo search and advertising partnership. He has since led ad products at Pandora, product strategy at MediaMath, and was Chief Product Officer at both the ad exchange Yieldmo, and at Bark — the publicly traded company behind BarkBox. Eric has been part of fourteen acquisitions across his career, on both the buy and sell side.
A prolific voice in the industry, Picard has published more than 200 articles in trade press and advised more than thirty companies. He has mentored more than 100 professionals throughout his career. He is also the author of two novels.
About Fluency:
Fluency is the first Digital Advertising Operating System (OS) that transforms paid media operations challenges into breakthrough outcomes by centralizing all major campaign execution workflows into a single solution. The AI-powered automation platform eliminates the most time and resource-intensive aspects of campaign execution, and automates campaigns across all major digital ad channels - including walled gardens and the open web. As a result, advertisers can activate, automate, and analyze any number of campaigns with unprecedented efficiency, working at a scale not previously achievable. Fluency powers nearly $3b in annual media spend. Its user base supports more than 250,000+ monthly campaigns for brands with 50,000+ locations.