Tag: programmatic
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Most European Ad Execs Expect Agentic Buying Within a Year. Most Still Keep People Steering.
An IAB Europe survey of 50 ad executives finds 58% expect agentic ad buying to be in operational use or at scale within a year. Yet 36 of 47 say their organizations have no agent operating day to day, or one that humans still direct, and agents mostly handle reporting.
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Butler/Till Pointed Its Buying Agent at iHeart’s, Skipping the SSP
Two AI agents — one built by the agency, one by the publisher — met over an MCP server and placed just under $10,000 of podcast and streaming audio inventory. No SSP in the middle. Butler/Till says CPMs came in 42% below the client’s own benchmark for direct buying.
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WPP Media Tests the Synthetic Audiences for Programmatic Buying
WPP Media is testing “synthetic audiences” for programmatic buying in the U.S. through a partnership with Givsly, a tech company founded in 2019. The audience segments are built partly from charity donation data: where donations happen, how often, and to what kinds of causes. The pitch is simple enough. Instead of relying only on open-web…
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Hershey’s Wants Its AI Agents Measuring the Candy Spend, Not Just Buying It
While AI media-buying agents hog the attention, Hershey’s has been applying agentic tech to something less glamorous: media mix modeling. According to Digiday, the confectioner worked with Mutinex and Tracer.tech and spent a year building a system of several AI agents to produce campaign media modeling in weeks rather than months. The goal is to…
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The Trade Desk Lets Claude Fill Out the Paperwork—Just Don’t Call It “Buying” Yet
The Trade Desk is talking to agency execs about Koa Agents, a set of agentic features meant to automate large parts of programmatic setup and troubleshooting. The system connects with whatever AI model a partner is using — including Anthropic’s Claude — through an interoperability layer called Open Agentic Kit. According to an agency exec…
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Wpromote’s AI Strategy: Let the Bots Pitch, But Keep the Keys
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…
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The promise and problem of agentic AI in advertising
AI agents were everywhere around the Super Bowl this year—so brands are doing the obvious thing: chasing attention where the attention is. The twist is that both consumers and the industry are still figuring out what “agentic” actually means in practice, even as platforms keep shipping new tools. Google’s Ashish Gupta pointed to longer, more…
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Agentic ad buying has moved from niche topic to top-tier anxiety for media planners
Agentic ad buying has officially graduated from niche curiosity to boardroom concern. In the IAB’s January 2026 Outlook Study, 40% of US ad buyers said that getting their arms around agentic ad buying and how campaigns actually get executed is one of their top worries for 2026—ranking right up there with the usual macro and…
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Butler/Till’s agentic media-buying tests cut costs and time
Butler/Till just wrapped its first real-world test of an “agentic” programmatic buy for Geloso Beverage Group, working with PubMatic—and the numbers are hard to ignore. Across two flights (Dec. 2025–Jan.) running on CTV, online, and mobile app inventory from names like Samsung, Paramount, Vizio, and Tubi, the setup cut supply chain costs by 82% (with…
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The Trade Desk Lets Claude Push the Buttons (Carefully)
The Trade Desk is testing whether advertisers can build campaigns using Anthropic’s Claude. Speaking at Marketecture Live in New York, CEO Jeff Green described a closed beta that lets a subset of advertisers create campaigns through a large language model. Details on what Claude actually does in the workflow are, for now, thin. Green’s broader…
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AI in Shoulder Pads: NBCUniversal Tests AI Ad Agents During NFL Playoff
NBCUniversal just turned what’s arguably the most old-school corner of ad buying—live linear NFL TV—into a sandbox for AI experimentation. Partnering with RPA, Newton Research, and FreeWheel, NBCU successfully tested AI agents on both the buy and sell side to handle key parts of the sales process for a playoff game. This wasn’t about full…
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Claritin Gets a Lift from a Smarter Algorithm
Bayer is pulling its programmatic strategy tighter to home, bringing control of its custom ad-buying algorithm in-house and into Snowflake’s data clean room. Partnering with Chalice AI, Bayer now runs its model inside its own data ecosystem—one that includes media, creative, and commerce info—without shifting sensitive files all over the place. Previously, integrating the algorithm…
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The Trade Desk Gets Into the Virtual Set With AI-Driven Product Placement
The Trade Desk is stitching branded goods into content—literally. Through a new partnership with startup Rembrand, advertisers can now buy programmatic product placements inside existing video content across the open internet. Rembrand’s generative AI scans scenes frame by frame, then inserts branded objects like signage or packaging post-production, no filming required. The integration plugs directly…
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When AI Curates the Buy: Butler/Till’s Shortcut to Smarter PMPs
Butler/Till’s latest campaign for a financial services client didn’t just rely on traditional DSP smarts—it leaned into artificial intelligence to outmaneuver legacy ad tech inefficiencies. The agency tapped SWYM.ai’s SCaLE tool (Smart Curation and Learning Engine) to tailor Private Marketplaces (PMPs) that were more in sync with actual performance goals. The result? A 56% lift…
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Roblox to enable programmatic ad sales via PubMatic
The popular gaming / metaverse platform looks to bring scale to its advertising offerings later this year… Roblox has announced a partnership with supply-side platform (SSP) PubMatic, which will enable programmatic media buying of the popular metaverse gaming platform’s video advertising inventory when it becomes available later this year. According to Stephanie Latham, Roblox’s vice…
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Dentsu launches post-cookie solution
Dentsu has rebranded and enhanced its M1 platform, now calling it Merkury for Media and bringing a complete identity platform to the table to enable addressable media and AI-powered decisioning and optimization. The company said it is the only live platform where every dollar of media placed is using first-party data. “As the industry looks for…
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NBCU partners with Trade Desk to make Olympic inventory biddable
NBCUniversal will make Olympic inventory available programmatically for the first time this summer. The media giant also unveiled a stoppable TV offering called Virtual Concessions that will officially launch during the Games. To do it, the broadcaster is partnering with The Trade Desk, which will build a private marketplace that’ll let advertisers bid on everything…
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Programmatic DOOH poised for growth
Planning and Trading platform VIOH, part of JCDecaux, recently released results from a survey of 200 digital and OOH specialists… U.S. respondents said that nearly a third (31%) of the campaigns they worked on in the past 12 to 18 months included a programmatic digital OOH (prDOOH) component. That’s expected to increase to 39% in the next 18…
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UGG programmatic DOOH case study
Interesting case study shared by Ian Dallimore from Lamar – highlighting the brand’s usage of weather-triggered targeting for contextual relevance and mobile retargeting for additional frequency.