Opinion

Everybody wants to make the most of agentic AI in advertising. The winners will do it with purpose. Here’s how to make a plan, step by step.

On a Tuesday in early September, I found myself bouncing between the NFL, the US Open quarterfinals and Women’s College Volleyball, with a baseball game or two in the mix. Oh, and the FIBA Women’s World Cup had already finished for the day. Multiply that by every American with a remote and a phone, and you get a picture of what fall sports season looks like.

Scaled show-level optimization is not a standard product. In many cases, that functionality is still in the early stages of development.

Retail media’s explosive growth over the past few years is the result of a straightforward pitch to advertisers: the ability to reach consumers close to the point of purchase, connect media exposure to transactions and prove conversion. Retail media is exceptionally effective at capturing existing demand as a lower-funnel performance channel.

The advertising market needs a more cohesive path from the campaign brief to the live buy. Answering a mobile RFP can take three to five days and require four teams across research, audience building, supply vetting and deal setup. Much of that time goes toward assembling evidence and moving information between functions rather than making the decisions that shape the campaign.

Where teens were once swept into the same cohort as 18-34, brands will have to have separate strategies and tactics to engage them. And this shift comes just as Gen Alpha comes of age.

It seems like every athlete has a podcast or docuseries these days. From Travis Kelce and the Mannings to LeBron James and Cam Newton, athletes have gone from being the subject of sports media to becoming media businesses in and of themselves.

While Eric Seufert’s “everything is an ad network” mantra keeps being proven correct, a new truism is also taking shape: “Wherever an advertising business emerges, the measurement challenge follows.”

FAST’s credibility gap is structural: Platforms are sitting on audience data that would validate the inventory they’re selling, and they are choosing not to share it.

AI is transforming how the pharma industry approaches drug development. On average, the industry invests $2.6 billion to bring a new treatment to market, taking 12 to 15 years with a 10% success rate. But pharma pioneers are leveraging AI to rethink traditional models. Sanofi, for example, is developing a “lab-in-a-loop” that uses AI agents to potentially compress elements of discovery work from years to weeks.

Look at ad tech’s press releases this year. Magnite is rebuilding SpringServe to own the decisioning layer, AI-driven demand routing, price setting and coordination between buyer and seller agents. Raptive launched an intelligence division, appointed a chief AI officer and outright acquired an AI company.

The burden of understanding ad auction dynamics should not sit with buyers. Platforms built the systems, and only platforms can fully explain how they set the price. 

This summer’s high-profile sports events, highlighted by the World Cup, reaffirmed their unique power to capture attention and unite global audiences. But, for many brands, turning that attention into impact is hard: Demand is high, inventory is limited and audiences are fragmented across a complex media landscape.

CTV’s growth will hinge on randomized experiments that prove premium video advertising delivers incremental business results, writes measurement expert Rick Bruner.

Why does the buy side remain so smitten with handing control to autonomous systems owned by companies whose economic interests are not its own?

Systems built for one purpose, governed by the interests of a narrow group of stakeholders, are being used in ways the people subject to them never even imagined.

Per-token price for frontier models may go up or down, but the cost to solve complex problems is going to increase, writes Zefr’s Jon Morra.

A report dropped last month from eMarketer that made me curious. Social networks will capture 27.7% of all US ad spend this year, despite accounting for just 12.5% of the time Americans spend with media. Convergent TV (linear and CTV), where consumers spend 38.5% of their media day, gets 18% of budgets. As Digiday put it, “The pendulum is swinging back to the feed, signaling that the crown of digital video dominance is going to social media.”

What happens when you let an AI agent handle back-to-school shopping – and realize you may have outsourced the fun parts, too?

Marketing teams are getting faster with AI, but the real question is whether they’re actually getting better outcomes, writes Devart’s Margaret Lee.

The accepted narrative says linear TV can no longer provide what modern advertisers want. The real story is more complicated.

The parts of AI that touch real money should always sit on deterministic infrastructure that’s been doing this long enough to know how to do it right, writers Fluency’s Eric Picard.

Will Walmart’s acquisition of Vibe.co create an AOL-esque walled garden – or a CTV platform advertisers actually want to use?

The FTC’s lawsuit that alleging Hims & Hers shared sensitive health data with advertisers is only the latest reminder that trust must be an operating principle, not just a marketing promise.

The Publicis/LiveRamp acquisition raises a stark question: Can shared identity infrastructure really stay neutral under competitor ownership?

The next internet will not be built by humans clicking buttons; it will be built by agents acting on behalf of people, brands, publishers, platforms and enterprises. 

With the right safeguards in place, open-market CTV can match PMP performance, proving that quality controls – not deal type – drive results, argues Ayse Pamuk, director of platform operations at Basis.

Performance marketing has fundamentally changed how marketers define success. Better targeting, attribution and optimization finally give marketing leaders what they’ve always wanted, which is a concrete way to prove that advertising works, expressed through performance metrics that CFOs understand.

Somewhere between what the ad industry says and what the market rewards is often where the truth lives. Here are the three industry storylines most in need of debunking.

Two-thirds of consumer attention lives on the open internet, but only one-fifth of ad spend follows it there. That gap is no accident. Walled gardens spent the past decade creating it.