'Spray and pray' needs a less spiritual alternative: PurePlay's Eric Steigelfest

PurePlay AI co-founder and CEO Eric Steigelfest, speaking at the Beet.TV Leadership Summit with Omnicom Media during Advertising Week New York, argues agentic AI's real test is whether it connects spending to business results rather than adding a fashionable adjective to a pitch. PurePlay's approach is to apply decision rules inside supply-side platforms to filter opportunities by conversion-likelihood signals, sourced from claims data partners in pharma, foot-traffic partners in retail and purchase data in CPG, before the impression ever reaches a DSP. "Keep doing what you're doing. We'll curate this," is the buyer pitch. The company has also tested direct agent-to-agent transactions between brands and publishers that bypass SSPs and DSPs, though Steigelfest is measured about it: "There are roles for SSPs and DSPs to still play." The end state he and co-founder Ross McCray, who founded VideoAmp, are steering toward is measurable outcomes becoming optimization targets and ultimately guarantees.

The crux

The agentic label only matters if it moves buying from impression-cost reporting to outcome guarantees, and the first place that happens is at the SSP, where inventory gets curated before a buyer ever sees it.

Sell-side read

If curation at the SSP becomes the default, publishers with signal-rich inventory get pre-filtered in, while undifferentiated inventory gets filtered out, so a publisher's own outcome data is what decides whether it is in or out of the curated pool.

Watch

Whether outcome-based guarantees move beyond CTV awareness into standard display and video buys, which would force every publisher to prove incremental value.