Publishers still ask about agentic ROI

Despite the agentic media buying hype, senior publisher executives say it remains a test-and-learn proposition rather than a proven source of returns. Digiday interviewed three senior commercial publishing executives at Advertising Week New York and all described evaluating, testing or learning about agent-led buying rather than committing to it. The Economist's global head of advertising Jamie Jouning said it "would be very hard for me to go and seek investment from our leadership team for something that we don't know whether or not it's going to be of value to us." Newsweek CRO Danielle Varvaro and The New York Times' global chief advertising officer Joy Robins both described an evaluation phase, while buy-side agencies are already moving agentic buying from experimentation into real campaigns. Sell-side programmatic exec Amit Grover of KPI Village says publishers are prioritizing near-term revenue over adoption. Publishers are instead doubling down on what they control: Newsweek is growing nearly 20% year over year on a B2B flywheel built partly on the Adprime ad network it bought last year, and The Economist is expanding video from two shows a week to six in January.

The crux

The buy side is automating faster than the sell side is willing to follow, and publishers are choosing near-term revenue diversification over unproven agentic infrastructure until someone shows the return.

Sell-side read

The window to shape how agentic demand finds publisher inventory is now, before buy-side agents hard-code supply preferences; publishers who expose machine-readable inventory get a seat at the table, while those who wait risk being disintermediated by default.

Watch

Whether any major publisher announces a signed agent-to-agent deal in the next two quarters, and whether sell-side agent tooling such as Prebid's open-source Sales Agent moves from beta to production.