Marketers are nervous about agentic media buying. WPP is betting governance is the answer. Which is why alongside the launch of its Buyer Agent for Video yesterday (June 18), it unveiled a coalition of premium media owners including Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Fox as well as standards bodies IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org. It is, for all intents and purposes, a message to skeptical marketers: look how many responsible adults are in the room. Because their concern isn’t just about what agents might do wrong. It is about what marketers are being asked to give up.
“Autmation for us isn’t the goal, better decision making is the goal,” said Lauren Wetzel, global president of data and technology solutions at WPP.
That promise is partly technical and partly historical. Every media owner in the coalition is building its own seller agent on its own infrastructure, using its own models. Without a common standard between them, the risk is a new layer of fragmentation that’s more opaque and harder to audit than what came before. Wetzel called it the “Rosetta Stone” problem, So alongside building the agency, WPP Media is working with its partners and standards bodies to establish shared protocols for how buyer and seller agents communicate, validate decisions and execute approved transitions. That work, she said, is as important as the agent itself.
