Agentic advertising automation gave Dealer.com (Cox Automotive) the infrastructure to orchestrate 59,000+ campaigns without growing their payroll.

Cox Automotive manages digital advertising for more than 4,000 unique auto dealer clients across a complex, dual-sided tech stack (both publishers and buy-side). The company runs highly complex local campaigns using its industry-leading proprietary audience data sets, plus live inventory feeds, DMA targeting, and multichannel configurations. 

But as their client portfolio grew, reliance on manual campaign builds and reporting workflows hindered Cox Automotive’s ability to scale. Even though the company wanted to improve efficiency and trim excess labor costs, they also wanted their teams to be leaders in using agentic advertising tools. 

Anne Thiel, Senior Director of Advertising and Revenue Operations at Cox Automotive, shares how her teams partnered with Fluency to build their agentic advertising operations. With Fluency, the team uses agents to run automated monthly pacing, budget planning, reporting, and campaign setup. Now, her teams can shift away from nuanced campaign mechanics to running robust client strategies.

What Dealer.com achieved with Fluency’s agentic automation:

• 83 working days’ worth of labor saved every month on reporting workflows: Using Fluency’s multichannel reporting agents, automatically building and distributing reports for thousands of dealers directly within Fluency reduced production time from 40 minutes per report to 15. Thiel reports that this saves them 83 working days’ (or 650+ hours) worth of labor on reporting workflows every month, all while delivering completed reports to dealers 66% faster than before.
• 59,000+ localized campaigns orchestrated annually via agentic automation: Cox Automotive uses Fluency Blueprints, an agentic execution engine, to connect business data and external signals directly to dealer campaign behavior. Each campaign responds to real-time signal changes without a human approving each event. From 110 foundational Blueprints templates, Dealer.com can autonomously manage and maintain more than 59,000 localized campaigns each year. These agentic workflows make up the bulk of the 357 million campaign updates Cox Automotive’s teams made to client campaigns over 12 months.
• Doubled strategist account management capacity: Assigning repetitive execution tasks to AI agents doubled how many accounts each of Cox Automotive’s strategists can manage. Thiel says the team's focus has moved to strengthening client strategies, relationship work, and agent workflow design.
• 90% reduction in non-strategic tasks: Agentic automation removed the manual execution overhead previously consuming most of the team's time. Now, they can support significantly higher business volume even though the team size hasn’t increased.
• Scale without hitting a headcount ceiling: With pacing, budgeting, and campaign management managed by AI agents, Dealer.com now supports $200M+ in active ad spend across 4,000+ accounts without proportional headcount growth. The business scales dealer volume through the platform, not the team.

Questions answered in this video

How does agentic advertising work for automotive advertisers?

As shown in this Cox Automotive video testimonial, agentic advertising means automated systems handle executing core AdOps tasks—budget pacing; performance report generation and distribution; campaign setup—while strategists direct the overall strategy carried out by agents. 

Using Fluency Blueprints to apply preconfigured audience parameters, DMA targeting, and targeting radiuses for local dealers helps Cox Automotive manage more than 59,000 localized campaigns annually and execute 357 million updates. Performance reports, which previously took 40 minutes to build, now take 15 minutes using agentic workflows. Plus, dealers receive analysis 66% faster than before.

How do you automate campaign launches across hundreds of dealers?

Cox Automotive uses Blueprints, Fluency's agentic automation engine, to tie specific dealer business data and external signals directly to localized campaign automation rules. This includes attributes like audience selection, DMA configuration, and setting targeting radiuses at launch. Instead of configuring each dealer’s localized campaign on a one-by-one basis, the team uses Blueprints to build localized campaigns for each location within an dealership client portfolio. Now, they can agentically manage over 59,000 campaigns each year without proportional manual effort.

How can I scale my advertising operations without hiring more people?

For Cox Automotive, the answer was supplementing human-led strategies with agentic execution. The team uses Fluency’s agentic automation operating system to autonomously manage budget pacing, client reporting and analyses, and localized campaign setup in bulk. Previously, they had to hire new staff every time their client load increased beyond the current team’s capacity. With Fluency’s agentic automation, they’ve effectively decoupled headcount from business growth.

What makes Fluency the right agentic advertising platform for enterprise advertisers?

Cox Automotive chose Fluency because the platform already had all the connections they needed to run agentic advertising workflows. It could connect to the right data sources, major ad channels, and had the right technical infrastructure to automate agent execution while adhering to strict governance demands. 

Fluency’s deterministic rules engine guarantees that every agentic workflow produces brand-compliant, accurate ads at scale. This gave the Cox Automotive team confidence to use agents without constant oversight, knowing the system would adhere to their human-set strategies. As Anne Thiel, Senior Director of Advertising and Revenue Operations at Cox Automotive, put it: "Fluency already has all of the connections that we need to build the agents to do the work."