‘Spray And Pray’ Ad Campaigns Need Less Spiritual Alternative: PurePlay AI’s Eric Steigelfest
Advertising has acquired a generous supply of agentic AI. Eric Steigelfest would like to see real results.
The co-founder and chief executive of agentic ad platform PurePlay AI sees potential in autonomous advertising tools. He also sees an industry capable of sprinkling a fashionable adjective over a sales pitch and calling it innovation.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet.TV Leadership Summit with Omnicom Media during Advertising Week New York 2026, Steigelfest offered an illustration: He recently attended an industry awards show where two companies received recognition for running the first fully agentic campaign.
Yep, even first place can now be optimized for additional inventory.
Behind the joke was a serious argument. AI should help advertisers connect spending to business results, improve buying decisions and reduce waste. A more impressive vocabulary is optional.
Awareness advertising gets homework assignment
Steigelfest said advanced measurement has yet to reach all the people who need it most: account teams and media buyers who explain campaign performance to clients.
Those teams must show how advertising dollars produce business outcomes. As measurement becomes more widely adopted in awareness advertising, he said, expectations for how campaigns are executed should rise too.
He described a principle he discusses with Ross McCray, PurePlay AI co-founder and founder of VideoAmp: Measurable outcomes should become targets for optimization and, ultimately, guarantees.
Connected television is a particular focus. Steigelfest described an industry accustomed to reporting impression costs and video completion rates. His ambition is to give agencies evidence of business impact that can travel all the way to a client’s chief financial officer.
The video finished playing. Wonderful. Now comes the slightly less festive question of what it accomplished.
Better decisions before the bid
PurePlay’s approach includes evaluating advertising opportunities before they reach a demand-side platform, or DSP, which advertisers use to buy media.
Steigelfest said the company can apply decision rules within supply-side platforms, or SSPs, which help publishers sell advertising. The aim is to filter opportunities using signals associated with a greater likelihood of conversion.
For buyers, his pitch is straightforward: “Keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll curate this.”
He said PurePlay works with claims data partners in pharmaceuticals, foot traffic partners in retail and purchase data partners in consumer packaged goods. Those signals help assess opportunities before they enter a buyer’s existing workflow.
The proposition is less a dramatic office renovation than a better filter at the front door. Buyers keep their tools while PurePlay seeks to improve what reaches them.
Creative brief gets second opinion
Steigelfest also sees a role for multimodal AI, which can analyze different forms of information, in creative planning.
PurePlay examines advertisers’ creative and competitors’ ads to identify signals that can inform audience selection and media placement. Before a shoot, that analysis can help reveal competitive gaps. Afterward, it can help teams assess what the finished advertising actually supports.
His point: A brief should not receive lifetime immunity from questioning simply because someone approved it.
“Now it’s scene-level targeting, so you can get extremely granular with those signals,” Steigelfest said.
He described using creative analysis to find opportunities, then turning to dynamic creative optimization to help address gaps. The goal is to make the advertising and the media plan work together more effectively.
Autonomy still has to earn its title
PurePlay has also tested direct transactions between agents representing brands and publishers, bypassing SSPs and DSPs, Steigelfest said.
He characterized that work as early-stage experimentation requiring broader adoption. He also acknowledged that “there are roles for SSPs and DSPs to still play.”
Inside PurePlay, his focus includes turning repeatable processes into reusable AI skills and combining models for different tasks.
“Everybody’s using LLMs now, right?” he said.
The harder question is whether those tools can perform useful work with fewer manual steps. For Steigelfest, that is where the agentic label has to justify itself. The fairy dust may help the pitch sparkle. The campaign still has homework.
Advertising has acquired a generous supply of agentic AI. Eric Steigelfest would like to see real results.
The co-founder and chief executive of agentic ad platform PurePlay AI sees potential in autonomous advertising tools. He also sees an industry capable of sprinkling a fashionable adjective over a sales pitch and calling it innovation.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet.TV Leadership Summit with Omnicom Media during Advertising Week New York 2026, Steigelfest offered an illustration: He recently attended an industry awards show where two companies received recognition for running the first fully agentic campaign.
Yep, even first place can now be optimized for additional inventory.
Behind the joke was a serious argument. AI should help advertisers connect spending to business results, improve buying decisions and reduce waste. A more impressive vocabulary is optional.
Awareness advertising gets homework assignment
Steigelfest said advanced measurement has yet to reach all the people who need it most: account teams and media buyers who explain campaign performance to clients.
Those teams must show how advertising dollars produce business outcomes. As measurement becomes more widely adopted in awareness advertising, he said, expectations for how campaigns are executed should rise too.
He described a principle he discusses with Ross McCray, PurePlay AI co-founder and founder of VideoAmp: Measurable outcomes should become targets for optimization and, ultimately, guarantees.
Connected television is a particular focus. Steigelfest described an industry accustomed to reporting impression costs and video completion rates. His ambition is to give agencies evidence of business impact that can travel all the way to a client’s chief financial officer.
The video finished playing. Wonderful. Now comes the slightly less festive question of what it accomplished.
Better decisions before the bid
PurePlay’s approach includes evaluating advertising opportunities before they reach a demand-side platform, or DSP, which advertisers use to buy media.
Steigelfest said the company can apply decision rules within supply-side platforms, or SSPs, which help publishers sell advertising. The aim is to filter opportunities using signals associated with a greater likelihood of conversion.
For buyers, his pitch is straightforward: “Keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll curate this.”
He said PurePlay works with claims data partners in pharmaceuticals, foot traffic partners in retail and purchase data partners in consumer packaged goods. Those signals help assess opportunities before they enter a buyer’s existing workflow.
The proposition is less a dramatic office renovation than a better filter at the front door. Buyers keep their tools while PurePlay seeks to improve what reaches them.
Creative brief gets second opinion
Steigelfest also sees a role for multimodal AI, which can analyze different forms of information, in creative planning.
PurePlay examines advertisers’ creative and competitors’ ads to identify signals that can inform audience selection and media placement. Before a shoot, that analysis can help reveal competitive gaps. Afterward, it can help teams assess what the finished advertising actually supports.
His point: A brief should not receive lifetime immunity from questioning simply because someone approved it.
“Now it’s scene-level targeting, so you can get extremely granular with those signals,” Steigelfest said.
He described using creative analysis to find opportunities, then turning to dynamic creative optimization to help address gaps. The goal is to make the advertising and the media plan work together more effectively.
Autonomy still has to earn its title
PurePlay has also tested direct transactions between agents representing brands and publishers, bypassing SSPs and DSPs, Steigelfest said.
He characterized that work as early-stage experimentation requiring broader adoption. He also acknowledged that “there are roles for SSPs and DSPs to still play.”
Inside PurePlay, his focus includes turning repeatable processes into reusable AI skills and combining models for different tasks.
“Everybody’s using LLMs now, right?” he said.
The harder question is whether those tools can perform useful work with fewer manual steps. For Steigelfest, that is where the agentic label has to justify itself. The fairy dust may help the pitch sparkle. The campaign still has homework.
