Programmatic
- 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.
- 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 DataWhat the first live transaction data tells us about how agent-to-agent media buying is actually developing.
- 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.
- How Brands Are Using AI Agents to Optimise Advertising CampaignsGoal-oriented buying, direct deal negotiation, and the earned autonomy framework for brands deploying AI agents in media.
- Can AI Agents Be Trusted to Manage Advertising Budgets?Who is accountable when an AI agent makes a bad media buy? The governance gap, earned autonomy, and deal-level audit trails.
- What Does Agentic Advertising Mean?How AI agents negotiate, buy and govern media deals, and how agentic advertising differs structurally from programmatic.
- How Brands Are Using AI Agents in Advertising: Early Use Cases and What They Are LearningBrand-side agentic deployment is bounded and instructive. What early adopters are finding about mandate design, data governance, and the infrastructure gap for direct publisher buying.
- How Agencies Are Deploying AI for Programmatic Buying: From Automation to Agent MandatesAgencies have been automating programmatic since it began. Agentic advertising changes the level of the buying stack that gets automated, and that changes the work agencies need to do.
- What AI Agents Actually Do in Media Buying: The Tasks, the Limits, the HandoversA practical account of which tasks a media-buying agent executes today, where the hard limits are, and how the handover between agent and human should be designed.
- $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 BuyingAutonomy in media buying is a permission earned through evidence, not a default setting. Here is why that matters.
- Is Agentic Advertising Ready for Enterprise Budgets? What to Verify Before You PilotA practical checklist for procurement and trading teams evaluating agentic platforms at scale.
- Brand Safety in Agentic Advertising: What Verification Looks Like at Machine SpeedHow brand safety controls work when buying decisions happen faster than human review cycles.
- Will AI Agents Replace Media Buyers? The Evidence-Based AnswerThe data on what agents can do now, what they cannot, and where the role of the human buyer is heading.
- Is Agentic Advertising a Black Box? What Transparency Actually Looks LikeWhy full audit trails and bilateral deal records change the transparency conversation in programmatic.
- What Does It Mean for an Ad Marketplace to Be Neutral? A Buyer's ChecklistSix questions to ask any marketplace claiming neutrality, and what honest answers look like.
- Supply Path Optimisation in the Age of AI Agents: What Changes and What Doesn'tSPO principles still apply in agentic buying. What changes is the speed and granularity of the decisions.
- The Honest Comparison: Agentic Marketplace vs Traditional DSP vs Managed ServiceA side-by-side look at three buying models: where each sits on cost, control, and transparency.
- Agentic Advertising Platforms Compared: A Buyer's FrameworkHow to evaluate competing agentic platforms across the dimensions that matter to a trading team.
- How to Evaluate an Agentic Media Buying Platform: 7 Questions Every Buyer Should AskThe questions that separate genuine agentic infrastructure from rebranded automation.
- What Is an Agentic Advertising Marketplace? How It Differs from a DSP or ExchangeThe structural difference between an agentic marketplace and the programmatic tools buyers already use.
- The WPP Research on Agentic Advertising: What the Findings Mean for BuyersBreaking down WPP's findings and what they signal for brands considering their first agentic pilot.
- The Agentic Advertising Glossary: Key Terms Every Programmatic Team NeedsPlain definitions for the terms appearing in every agentic pitch deck, without the hype.
- How AI Agents Optimise Media Buying: A Practical BreakdownWhat agent-driven optimisation actually involves, decision by decision, and where human approval sits.
- Agentic Advertising vs Programmatic Advertising: What Actually ChangesNot a rebrand of existing automation. The real differences in how deals are negotiated and governed.
- What Is Agentic Advertising?A clear definition of agentic advertising, how it works, and why it represents a structural shift in media buying.
- 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 NeedsWhy an independent evidence layer, separate from ad servers and measurement vendors, changes what trust means in programmatic.
- The Multi-Agent ConflictAlkimi Research
- The Brand Visibility Battle you are Not Tracking YetAlkimi Insight
- How Alkimi and Sui Are Fixing the Broken Ad EcosystemHow Alkimi's neutral infrastructure and its technology partner are addressing the verification and transparency gaps in digital advertising.
- Measurement Isn't Verification: Fifteen Years of Self-Graded EssaysWhy the industry's reliance on self-reported measurement has never been a substitute for independent verification.
- What Your Clients Are Actually Asking When They Ask About AgenticThe underlying questions behind common client queries about agentic advertising, and how to answer them with evidence.
- Is your Brand ready for Agentic AdvertisingA readiness assessment for brand and agency teams approaching their first agentic media buying pilot.
- Inside Advertising: The Grid, Not The GladiatorBen Putley