Agentic ad buying reaches the mainstream

Agentic buying moved from pilot to expectation this week, as IAB Europe research found 58% of ad execs expect it to hit scale within a year, with WPP and Omnicom building buyer agents while CNN and News UK build sell-side agents, and IAB Tech Lab shipped AAMP 3.0 to standardise the RFP-to-buy workflow.

The crux

Publishers who do not make their inventory agent-readable and agent-buyable risk being excluded from the 27% of U.S. ad spend projected to run through AI buying platforms by 2030.

Sell-side read

Sell-side agents are arriving on the publisher side too, so the winning move is to build inventory that answers a brief, not just fills a seat; AAMP 3.0's pitch to publishers is literally "earn a place on more media plans."

Watch

Whether standards hold up, security was the top concern and privacy second, and whether Converge Digital's Ian Maxwell is right that agentic buying "automates a few small parts of a huge process" without moving outcomes.