How Agentic Buying Actually Works in CTV

Agentic ad buying has moved from hypothetical to in-market, at least in connected television, where independent agency InterMedia has started running a combination of Model Context Protocol and API integrations with Vibe.co and the ad decisioning startup Olyzon. Vibe lets campaign managers see CTV reporting inside Claude's dashboard and order actions from there; Olyzon connects those campaigns to DSPs and SSPs across display and digital out-of-home. Vibe says more than 1,000 brands have adopted its MCP integration and that MCP-enabled buying now accounts for a large portion of its ad spend. The plumbing is young: Model Context Protocol was only introduced by Anthropic in late 2024, and the ad industry's Ad Context Protocol followed in 2025. The work changes what an expert is, said InterMedia SVP of digital David Nyurenberg: "Instead of being an expert in how to navigate a platform and push the buttons and knowing where to go, you're an expert in being judicious about what changes to make." But humans stay in the loop. "You can trust AI to fly a plane, but I still want a pilot in the cockpit to watch it," said InterMedia's Sydney Brower. Olyzon co-founder and CEO Jules Minvielle is more bullish: "My conviction here is that, in 18 months, every single media buyer in the world will be equipped" with an agent.

The crux

MCP-based buying is now running real CTV budgets, which starts to remove the manual campaign-management layer that many publishers and agencies are still staffed around.

Sell-side read

Publisher inventory has to become machine-readable and exposed through agent-friendly interfaces, or it will simply be skipped by the buying agents that are being wired into agency workflows right now.

Watch

whether the Ad Context Protocol and IAB Tech Lab's competing AAMP framework converge or fragment, which decides how many agent integrations a publisher must build.