News
The latest updates, announcements, and insights from the Alkimi Exchange team.
- The Risk Register for Agentic Media Buying: What Can Go Wrong and How to PrepareSix specific risks in agentic media buying, each with named evidence and a practical mitigation: deal record divergence, data consent, creative mismatch, budget aggregation, liability allocation, and measurement reconciliation.
- Everyone Built the Easy Half | Alkimi Research
- What Is Agentic Advertising? As Explained by an AgentAgentic advertising is agents negotiating bilateral deal terms on behalf of humans. The shift from autonomy of execution to autonomy of agreement creates a record requirement, a liability question, and a measurement problem that programmatic never had.
- Creative Delivery as the Last Human Mile in Agentic AdvertisingAn agent can negotiate the placement. It cannot render the creative or guarantee it meets spec. When a deal is agreed for an environment the available creative cannot serve, it under-delivers through no fault of the placement decision or the deal record.
- Cutting Intermediaries: How Agentic Buying Changes the Programmatic Supply ChainSupply path optimisation has been a manual discipline for a decade. Agent-to-agent advertising changes the structural conditions that created the problem.
- The Measurement Gap: Who Verifies Delivery in Agentic Advertising?Third-party verification tools measure delivery against what was bought. In an agent-negotiated deal, the deal record may exist only in each agent's own system. Impression-level measurement is unaffected. Attribution and financial reconciliation are not.
- First-Party Data and Consent in Agentic Buying: Where the Governance Chain BreaksUnder GDPR, data processing requires a lawful basis established by a legal person. A software agent has no legal standing to establish one. First-party data cannot enter agent negotiation without prior explicit authorisation from a human data controller.
- The Standardisation Race: What Happens If AAMP and AdCP Do Not Converge?The IAB Tech Lab's agentic specifications and AdCP are developing in parallel with no convergence date. If both achieve adoption without merging, agentic advertising fragments along protocol lines. The fragmentation cost falls on buyers.
- What Does a Media Agency Actually Do When Agents Handle the Buying?Agents can execute buying decisions faster than human traders. They cannot define the campaign mandate, configure their own constraints, or take accountability for outcomes. The agency's role is relocated to mandate design and governance.
- Why Carbon Gets Harder When Agents Do the BuyingEvery carbon framework in advertising assumes a human reviewed the buy. When agents do the buying, that assumption disappears unless carbon weight is explicitly encoded as a hard constraint before the agent acts.
- Agentic Advertising Is Not Programmatic With Faster ReflexesProgrammatic automated the transaction inside human-set rules. Agentic advertising automates the agreement itself, changing what the infrastructure has to guarantee. Research across 90,202 simulated deals found 95.3% divergence under separate records.
- Semantic Drift Between Models: The Failure Mode Nobody Is Building AgainstSemantic drift is when two language models parse the same deal terms into different structured data. It is not detectable from inside either system: both sides agree, both records look clean, and they diverge on 95.3% of deal terms.
- From MFA to Agent-Negotiated Inventory: Why Transparency Just Got a New ProblemMFA detection happens post-buy today. In agentic advertising, the deal is agreed before the buy, moving quality evaluation to the point of negotiation or turning post-buy detection into an audit of a fait accompli.
- The Agentic Advertising Index: Reading the First Real Marketplace Data
- Who Is Answerable When an AI Agent Makes a Bad Media Buy?Advertising's accountability framework assigns liability to the human who authorised the buy. When an agent makes the buy, the contract's signatory was not in the room. Most current ad contracts have no answer to that.
- $3,000 a Day Is Honest. Most Agentic Advertising Announcements Are Not.Andrew Mole of pubX is the only agentic operator to answer the scale question with an integer: $3,000 a day gross. He also says most category announcements are the old programmatic pipes with a new word painted on them.
- AdCP and AAMP Agree on One Thing: The Shared Record Is the Hard PartAdCP's O'Kelley and AAMP's Singh were asked the same questions separately and arrived at the same answer: a shared deterministic deal record is a precondition for agentic advertising to function as a market, and it is not yet at scale.
- Natural-Language Confirmation Is Not a Transaction: The Verification Problem at the Heart of Agentic AdvertisingIAB Tech Lab's Shailley Singh: agentic advertising cannot rely on natural-language confirmation. Research across 90,202 simulated deals found 95.3% disagreement between separate agent records, falling to 0.19% with a shared record.
- Everyone Is Selling Agentic Advertising. Here Is What Is Actually Running.Both organisations building agentic advertising standards say the shared record is not yet in production at scale. The only operator willing to give a number is moving roughly $3,000 a day in gross media spend.
- Why Agents Still Need Human Sign-Off: The Case for Earned Autonomy in Ad Buying
- Is Agentic Advertising Ready for Enterprise Budgets? What to Verify Before You Pilot
- Brand Safety in Agentic Advertising: What Verification Looks Like at Machine Speed
- Will AI Agents Replace Media Buyers? The Evidence-Based Answer
- Is Agentic Advertising a Black Box? What Transparency Actually Looks Like
- What Does It Mean for an Ad Marketplace to Be Neutral? A Buyer's Checklist
- Supply Path Optimisation in the Age of AI Agents: What Changes and What Doesn't
- The Honest Comparison: Agentic Marketplace vs Traditional DSP vs Managed Service
- Agentic Advertising Platforms Compared: A Buyer's Framework
- How to Evaluate an Agentic Media Buying Platform: 7 Questions Every Buyer Should Ask
- What Is an Agentic Advertising Marketplace? How It Differs from a DSP or Exchange
- The WPP Research on Agentic Advertising: What the Findings Mean for Buyers
- The Agentic Advertising Glossary: Key Terms Every Programmatic Team Needs
- How AI Agents Optimise Media Buying: A Practical Breakdown
- Agentic Advertising vs Programmatic Advertising: What Actually Changes
- What Is Agentic Advertising?
- Right About the Agents. Wrong About Why.Ben Putley
- Rethinking the PCA for Agentic Campaigns Alkimi Insight
- Your Agent Needs a Second Agent Alkimi Research
- Bring the Brief. We'll Build the Agent.Newsletter
- When Two Agents DisagreeAlkimi Research
- Anyone Can Buy CTVAlkimi Research
- Anatomy of an Agentic Marketplacewith Sui and Walrus
- The Chain Didn't Get ShorterAlkimi Research
- The IAB AgreesAlkimi Research
- Agree. Transact. Verify.Ben Putley and Chandru Narayana
- The Verification Layer that Programmatic Needs
- The Multi-Agent ConflictAlkimi Research
- The Brand Visibility Battle you are Not Tracking YetAlkimi Insight
- How Alkimi and Sui Are Fixing the Broken Ad Ecosystem
- Measurement Isn't Verification: Fifteen Years of Self-Graded Essays
- What Your Clients Are Actually Asking When They Ask About Agentic
- Is your Brand ready for Agentic Advertising
- Inside Advertising: The Grid, Not The GladiatorBen Putley