To some, agentic media buying tools could fix some of programmatic advertising’s oldest headaches — ad-tech taxes, supply-chain murkiness, even the decline of the open web’s appeal and addressability. To others, it risks doing the opposite: adding another layer of opacity and pushing an already complex system into even greater chaos.The debate resurfaced recently after Omnicom CEO John Wren said the holdco was testing agent-to-agent media buys designed to create more direct publisher relationships and reduce what he described as the “toll” taken by ad-tech intermediaries. Stagwell and Butler/Till are among the other agencies notably pushing ahead with similar tech.
And while that may sound good to publishers, open-exchange programmatic advertising has also taught them not to trust the upside.
The Trade Desk’s Jeff Green said in an earnings call on May 7 that agentic buying only works at the scale of the open marketplace, not through direct buyer-seller relationships — a model he suggested some competitors are mistakenly building toward.
“Most companies that are focused on agentic in our space are just talking about plugging into these tiny pools of inventory,” Green told analysts on the call. “One advertiser connects to one publisher, and in doing so, you more or less create another ad network, where you have hundreds of thousands of ad networks because of the combination of one advertiser to one publisher and agents talking to each other.”
