Agentic Advertising: Are We There Yet?

Agentic advertising — the use of AI-driven agents to automate media buying and selling — has the potential to solve some of the open web's most persistent inefficiencies. But are we there yet? The short answer is: almost.

Core Problems in Current Advertising

The Discoverability Gap: Current DSPs rely heavily on allowlists, causing buyers to miss high-performing niche inventory and leaving valuable publisher inventory unsold.
Operational Friction: Direct Insertion Order (IO) workflows are labour-intensive, costly to scale, and difficult to manage for both large media holdcos and smaller publishers.
Market Fragmentation: With over 826 million supply paths, the market is overly complex. Currently, the top 100 publishers capture 70% of DSP spend, leaving the rest of the open web struggling for visibility.

The Promise of Agentic Advertising

Agentic protocols (such as AdCP and IAB Tech Lab's ARTF) aim to automate the direct IO workflow rather than replace Real-Time Bidding (RTB).

Key Benefits

Efficiency: Enables smaller players to compete without massive sales infrastructure.
Direct Relationships: Facilitates a shift back toward direct buying, which offers better targeting, measurement, and reduced reliance on intermediaries.
Cross-Channel Orchestration: Agentic systems are designed to handle complex, multi-product campaigns (display, video, branded content, events) that are currently difficult to manage manually.
Outcome-Based Innovation: Allows for the native implementation of complex models like Cost per Hour (CPH), which were previously "executional nightmares" due to technical limitations.

Key Voices

"Emarketer is predicting open web programmatic display to reach $42.53 billion in 2027 vs $182.75 billion spent on the walled garden in the US only — quite a gap."

"I am so bullish on the SMB piece. This is where the true growth lives… in the thousands of businesses who want to bring a similar modality from the walled gardens to the open web." — Luke Taplin-McCallum

"My hope is that agentic will diversify ad spend, sharing it across niche inventory with high value audiences — ones that are currently ignored due to their size." — Jamie Barnard

Current State of Adoption

The "Chicken and Egg" Problem: Buyers are waiting for more supply, while publishers are waiting for more demand.
Active Development: Prebid.org is open-sourcing the "seller agent" standard. IAB Tech Lab is actively developing ARTF. Independent agencies are already testing these protocols.
Outlook: Agentic will not replace all trading, but it will become the predominant mechanism for SMBs and platforms bridging the open web and walled gardens.

Conclusion

Success depends on resolving ad verification and brand safety guardrails, payment infrastructure, and scale. The transition will mirror programmatic's slow adoption curve — but as AI becomes standard, media dollars will follow the path of least friction.

Agentic advertising readiness starts with clean infrastructure and clear data strategy. MIMMS advises publishers and AdTech vendors on positioning for the next phase of programmatic.