Butler/Till, an independent media agency based in Rochester, New York, and iHeartMedia ran AI buying agents against streaming audio and podcast inventory for a four-week campaign, on behalf of an unnamed U.S. agricultural client. The agents placed just under $10,000 in media. They worked as a matched pair over an MCP server, one built by Butler/Till and one by iHeartMedia. A human planner handed the buying agent a campaign brief, and the agent took it to the publisher’s.
Earlier agentic buying pilots ran through middlemen such as the SSP PubMatic. This one was a direct buy between agency and publisher, and the inventory was audio rather than CTV or display. Kristie Murphy, associate director of programmatic at Butler/Till, said the test cut campaign CPMs by 42% against the client’s own benchmark for direct buying, and that 48% of delivered podcast impressions came from premium non-skippable mid-roll placements, against 33% estimated for mid-roll in the traditional plan.
“We’re moving away from the one-off test phase,” Murphy said. “Having audio in this mix now shows us there’s more potential for agentic, [that we’re] scaling beyond one channel.” The agency has run agentic buying pilots with a dozen clients across CTV and digital display. WPP Media has been building a buyer agent for video inventory, Omnicom’s John Wren said his company was pursuing a similar tool, and PMG is among the shops working with Comcast’s FreeWheel on planning and set-up agents.
eMarketer analyst Ross Benes suggested agentic applications in audio will stay limited until more radio and podcast inventory is opened to programmatic investment. “Just about one third of total digital audio is programmatic, whereas closer to 90% of total digital is — so the impact of agentic buying, which is a subset within a subset of media buys, will be limited for a while,” he said.
Read more at Digiday.