Are advertisers ready for agentic media buying?

Opinion

AI agents have the potential to transform the digital ad market forever, but for this to happen, brands need the comfort of clear governance and audit trails, says Hannah Mirza.

Media buying is changing. Real-time bidding is giving way to agent-led buying, and at the heart of that shift are two new roadmaps and rules, the Ad Context Protocol and IAB’s Tech Lab. The idea behind both is that AI agents require a common language to plan, negotiate and execute media spend across platforms.

This allows AI agents to explore the market, assess opportunities and connect them across publishers with greater precision and sophistication than real-time bidding or current AI optimisation tools. 

That might mean an agent – prompted to find premium video inventory on sports publishers for a Q2 campaign with a £50,000 budget – autonomously discovering products from connected sales agents, evaluating proposals with delivery forecasts, and filtering for brand-suitable inventory before creating a media buy. All without a human having to touch a dashboard.

Undoubtedly, that’s an attractive and efficient vision, and a host of ad tech companies are already offering agentic tools ranging from Scope3 through to The Trade Desk in an attempt to bring this kind of automation to advertisers.

Holding company Stagwell has just signed up to include The Trade Desk’s new agentic AI Koa agents in its global media planning and buying operations, while Omnicom now says it’s using AdCP as part of routine media buys for key clients on its OMNI platform.

Don’t forget the advertisers

Agent-led buying could be a game-changer, on a scale not seen since the launch of programmatic itself. But for that to happen, brands, media and procurement teams need to be comfortable with the technology and to trust it with budgets.

What’s currently missing from the conversation, however, is any discussion of whether brands are comfortable with a greater range of strategic decisions being automated and essentially handing their budgets over to an AI tool that they don’t control.

Many advertisers are already looking closely at how best to balance internal knowledge with the use of agencies, so there may be reluctance to add another layer of dependence. 

That’s because training agency planning and buying tools on brand data makes it more difficult for advertisers to leave, as the knowledge and advantage sit with these models and tools. Brands will be reluctant to add another layer of dependence on planning and buying agents given this reality.

A unique opportunity for advertisers to get agent-ready

What advertisers can do, however, is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to redesign their agency-and-tech-stack relationships. 

The fastest-moving advertisers are already building new operating models that integrate AI into strategic decisions about what they need to own and what they want to buy, build, or rent. The critical factor is that brands own the data and governance intelligence layer in any system designed for AI. 

Brands that simply bolt AI onto existing processes will end up with fragmented capabilities, while those that redesign their marketing architecture end-to-end will build something with genuine long-term value and competitive advantage.

Preparing for a world where agent-led media buying and planning is the norm will require testing early and building relationships with companies that offer agentic solutions, whether agencies or ad-tech companies. In particular, marketers will need to understand how each agent works, how to design in the right level of human input and what safeguards are built into each system.

The critical question every CMO should ask is: Am I comfortable that these systems can deliver growth and protect my budgets? Where do humans need to get involved, and what are the audit trails that can be used to interrogate the decisions being made?

There’s no doubt that AI will become a bigger part of the media planning and buying process, but what will determine how quickly these new protocols become the norm is whether enough brands feel comfortable with the risks involved and the mitigations they can build. 

Ultimately, it comes down to a question of trust: how much do brands trust the technology and the companies that own it?

Hannah Mirza is the founder and CEO of Responsible Marketing Advisory.