How Goodway is riding the climbing wave of agentic AI with an 'intentional' framework. By jenni baker, senior editor. Sponsored by: Goodway's rethink of campaign execution offers a practical lesson for leaders under pressure to deliver AI efficiency: connect the people, build the rules and give strategy room to breathe. For independent agency Goodway Group, keeping campaigns afloat used to swallow almost the entire working day. Just 10% of time on strategy; the other 90% into getting things set up properly - leaving little room to decide where campaigns should go next. That balance has now flipped, thanks to how it built and now operates agentic automation with Fluency. Using its new approach to campaign orchestration, now the opposite is true: 90% of time on strategy and campaign architecture, and just 10% getting campaigns live, according to Mike Wolk, senior vice-president of growth and partnerships at Goodway. In a conversation with Fluency's senior vice-president of product Eric Picard and vice-president of growth Heather Chevalley at Advertising Week New York, the session was a telling example of what agencies stand to gain as what Picard described as the "climbing wave" of agentic AI coming - and shared four priority pillars for campaign architecture. Getting the whole beach ball in view. Goodway had been building workflow technology for 10-15 years. But tools developed even a few years ago needed reassessing as the market changed. For Wolk, the choice was whether to keep improving what the agency already had or build "intentionally" toward where the market was heading. The commercial pressure was building, too. Clients were already pricing AI efficiency into engagements before the capability was ready. Agencies had to make specific bets, with specific outcomes, while funding the work to get there. Goodway started by bringing in its own consulting practice to examine how work happened across its systems and teams. A process with 10 steps might only need five. Automating it without asking that question would leave the unnecessary steps intact. Then came the people. Media practitioners understood campaign delivery. Data specialists understood the information feeding it. Leadership could get changes through legal, IT and organizational resistance. Bringing those perspectives together meant giving everyone a better view. "We have a saying that there's all these different stripes of a beach ball, and wherever you're on that stripe, you can't really see the other stripes. But if you talk together [and come together to look at it from the top], you can see it all," explained Wolk. "Rearchitecting for the future requires setting up an informed and empowered cross functional group," he says. "This can be an advantage for independent agencies that are able to be move quickly and to take a tool from a contract to a widely adopted and core agency capability." The team also needed authority to turn its recommendations into everyday practice. As Wolk said: "Signing a contract is very different than onboarding a capability." Want to go deeper? Ask the drum. That wider view also helped Goodway decide what to own. Building another internal tool meant choosing it over investment in creative strategy, measurement or something else. The agency evaluated 70 AI-first partners across its buying technology stack last year, looking for capabilities that could fill gaps. Its approach with Fluency was to own less and orchestrate more: bring Goodway's channel expertise and best practices into a system that could handle repetitive execution across platforms. Keeping control as the wave builds. As for the architecture underneath that decision, Chevalley shared four priority pillars: cross-channel activation, connected systems and data, governance and unified insights, with human judgment running through all four. In practice, campaign automation needs information from customer relationship management, order management and creative asset systems. It needs rules for how campaigns should run and a shared view of what is happening across channels. A case in point showed what that could enable: a small cross functional team of four was able to go from brief to live in less than a week and a half. Other workflows would have taken 50% longer or required more team members likely working nights and weekends to complete the same level of complex campaign. At that scale, ambiguity has consequences. The right budget, market and creative cannot be left to an agent's interpretation of what someone probably meant. As Picard said, "I don't think I would let an LLM manage my checkbook. Why would I let them totally unify my media stack?" Picard's broader message was around how to apply governance at scale; everything from effective prompts into an LLM, to knowing where LLMs best fit into the overall advertising workflow, to a scalable approach for human oversight. Fluency's approach is to encode repeatable decisions as business rules, with deterministic software executing according to defined conditions. Exceptions call for judgment, he said: "If we've got anything that hasn't been defined yet, and it happens, flag a human to get in the loop and actually make a decision." Goodway has taken a gradual approach to handing work over, setting up its rules, validating them with people and expanding automation as campaigns run correctly. There is a financial discipline here, too. Picard urged agencies to ask how much of a partner's workflow relies on large language models and how much uses traditional software. Millions of transactions can turn token costs into a serious business problem. "There's a happy medium in there," he said. Getting ideas out of the bucket. All that groundwork brings the story back to the strategist's desk and what Chevalley described as the "good idea bucket". "A good idea ends up going in the bucket because they know even if they had time to think about how to deploy that strategy, they wouldn't actually have time to scale it," she said. "Now I feel like the good idea bucket has gone away. They have a good idea, and they're able to execute tests and if it works, send it on its way to be deployed across 1000s of campaigns or accounts." "AI can be transformational and do incredible things, but oftentimes the most impactful use case is to solve the simple - the bottlenecks, the key strokes, the task oriented, repetitive work," she adds. For Goodway, the shift in working time meant lower barriers to testing once campaigns were live. Adding a channel or tactic became easier. More time could go into client conversations and useful insights. The agency could act on more of the thinking it was hired to do. That's a useful ambition for agency leaders facing the next wave: examine where time goes, document the rules and empower people who can see beyond their own stripe. Test the execution before giving automation more responsibility, with Wolk offering a final principle for choosing those investments: "Just as important as what you do is what you choose not to do". Goodway's intentional approach makes the connection clear. Seeing the whole beach ball helps an agency build the systems that get good ideas out of the bucket. And riding the wave becomes considerably more useful when there is time to steer. To learn more about how Goodway and other digital advertising leaders approached Agentic AI, check out Fluency's latest resource The Agentic Advertising Playbook: How to Build a Scalable Agentic Advertising Operation. Featuring: Goodway Group Goodway Group is a global marketing services company that unlocks growth for the world's most progressive and forward-thinking brands.

Fluency named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for the fourth year in a row. Agentic Advertising Operating System Ranked in the Top 40% of the List BURLINGTON, VT, UNITED STATES, August 13, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ - Fluency, the Agentic Advertising Operating System (OS) for scaling paid media across search, social and programmatic channels, announced that it has been named to the 2026 Inc. 5000 list for the fourth consecutive year. The annual list is the most prestigious ranking of the nation's most successful independent and entrepreneurial businesses. The company ranked in the top 40% overall and No. 5 among the fastest-growing companies in Vermont. Fluency enables advertising agencies and in-house teams to automate advertising execution across walled gardens like Google, Meta and TikTok and the DSPs that power the open web. The platform works as an orchestration and governance layer that connects an advertiser's data and systems to every platform so campaigns get built, budgets get paced and rules get enforced automatically, the same way every time. Today, Fluency powers $3 billion in annual ad spend across more than 250,000 campaigns every month. "We've spent eight years building infrastructure that lets agencies and in-house teams automate and run their advertising the same reliable way every time, no matter how fast their business grows," said Mike Lane, CEO of Fluency. "Making this list for the fourth year in a row reflects the continued trust our clients place in us, as well as their commitment to scaling their operations with agentic automation. We look forward to continuing to help them grow and thrive." This year's Inc. 5000 recognizes a new class of companies redefining what growth looks like. From AI and advanced manufacturing to healthcare, consumer products and professional services, these businesses are expanding their impact, creating jobs and proving that entrepreneurial ambition continues to fuel the U.S. economy. Among the 5,000 companies on the list, the median three-year revenue growth rate was 130%, and those companies have collectively added more than 627,208 jobs to the U.S. economy over the past three years. "Every company on the Inc. 5000 has a story of perseverance, smart decision making, and a refusal to sit still," says Mike Hofman, editor-in-chief of Inc. "Their growth reflects more than strong financial performance-it reflects creativity, resilience and the customer focus required to build companies that make a lasting impact. We congratulate all honorees on this significant achievement." Within the past year, Fluency was also named one of Vermont's Best Places to Work and named to Ad Age's Best Places to Work list for the second year in a row. The company ranked among the fastest-growing companies in North America on the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and was most recently honored in the MarTech Breakthrough Awards. Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including Fluency's company profile can be found at www.inc.com/inc5000. About Fluency Fluency is the Agentic Advertising Operating System (OS) that enables agencies and in-house teams to automate paid media execution across channels while running AI safely and at scale. The platform centralizes campaign creation, budget management, reporting and compliance into a single system, so advertisers can scale their operations and reliably run campaigns with the same precision every time. With AI governance across every paid channel, including the walled gardens and the open web, Fluency manages $3 billion in annual ad spend. This includes more than 250,000 monthly campaigns for 150 agencies across more than 50,000 locations. The company raised a $40 million Series A in 2025 and ranked on the Inc. 5000 in 2026 for its fourth consecutive year. With a founding team that has worked in online advertising since 1998, Fluency holds certified partnerships with major ad publishers and was named a finalist for Technology Innovation in the 2024 Amazon Ads Partner Awards. About Inc. Inc. is the leading media brand and playbook for the entrepreneurs and business leaders shaping our future. Through its journalism, Inc. aims to inform, educate, and elevate the profile of its community: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who are creating the future of business. Inc. is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow leading business publication Fast Company. For more information, visit www.inc.com. Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.