Kargo has rolled out “Project Kera,” a chat-style planning and buying interface (closed beta) aimed at making cross-channel activation feel less like stitching together five different dashboards. The pitch: one agentic layer that can pull together biddable and non-biddable inventory, with beta testers including Hershey, travel media network Navigator, and indie agency Wpromote. Kargo’s CEO Harry Kargman frames it as a unified platform play; Wpromote’s view is more pragmatic—use it as one component in a broader agency-run system rather than a new command center. As Wpromote’s Skyler McGill put it, “Technology and agents are really about enabling marketers to be more strategic in decision-making and orchestration across systems.”
After about four weeks of testing, Wpromote says the biggest early impact is workflow speed—specifically, compressing the time from a human campaign brief to a live, programmatically activated campaign. Buyers feed the chatbot a goal, upload creative, specify placements (streaming TV, social feeds, premium news), and the tool suggests formats (pause ads, big display, social video) plus a channel/budget mix across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, CTV, and the open web. Hit approve, and Kera activates through Kargo’s SSP connections.
McGill’s takeaway: “What’s really exciting is the ability to operationalize a campaign brief and build creativity at scale, then optimize in real time,” with early tests spanning high-impact CTV units (pause ads, immersive overlays) and custom display. Performance numbers aren’t in yet—McGill says it’s too early—but the agency expects lift once prompts and workflows get more dialed in.
Zooming out, Wpromote is clearly in “build the OS, not buy it” mode. The agency has its own internal AI tool, Polaris IQ, for bid management, budgeting, planning, and measurement—meant to sit above DSPs, SSPs, and everything else as a centralized decision layer. That’s why it’s piloting multiple agentic partners (Kargo and PubMatic on the SSP side) and keeping an eye on DSP-led efforts from Yahoo and Amazon, with McGill noting SSPs have moved faster to bundle formats, inventory, and activation into a single workflow. But adoption hinges on the usual agency scorecard—performance, efficiency, and control—with an extra emphasis on guardrails: transparency, data quality, governance, and QA, because prompt-driven buying can’t become a black box. In McGill’s words: “We’re being really mindful of overreliance on automation.”
Read more at AdExchanger.