Agentic Media Buying: Hype vs. Reality

The Promise: More Ad Dollars Actually Reaching Publishers

The current digital ad system is famously leaky. Between an advertiser's budget and a publisher's revenue, a long chain of intermediaries takes their share. For every dollar an advertiser spends, a surprisingly small fraction reaches the website or app running the ad.

Agentic buying promises to change that. AI agents could talk directly to publisher ad servers, cutting out the middlemen entirely.

"Agentic media trading does stand to contribute to supply chain cleanup, as it puts the buyer directly in touch with the publisher's ad server and removes other middlemen from the transaction," said Justin Wohl, VP of strategy at Aditude.

The theory goes further. Properly governed agents could be trained to favor high-quality, brand-safe inventory rather than just the cheapest option. They could chase new customers instead of repeatedly targeting the same users. Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Raptive, notes that agents could push more working budget back to publishers. Gabriel Dorosz of publisher association INMA adds that at scale, agents could "ruthlessly reprioritize" away from cheap, commoditized inventory, accelerating a flight toward premium content. That would be good news for top-tier publishers with strong audience data. For the long tail of the open web, the picture is murkier.

The Problem: New Technology, Same Old Incentives

The optimism has a shadow. Holding companies championing agentic buying also own many of the intermediaries they claim to be cutting out. They own their own demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and data businesses. Critics point out that an AI agent controlled by a holding company could quietly route spending through those same in-house tools, reintroducing the opacity that agentic buying was supposed to eliminate.

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"No doubt it will be used for a whole amount of get-rich-quick obfuscation and intermediary gains," said Craig Tuck, chief revenue officer of Ozone. "That's just digital advertising with a new name."

Amy Porter, SVP and executive director of digital media at RPA, puts it more diplomatically. She argues that fully autonomous buying is premature. "The future likely isn't fully autonomous media buying," she said, "but instead it could be AI augmenting operational workflows while experienced practitioners remain responsible for strategy, judgment, and accountability."

The ANA/PwC transparency initiative is a cautionary tale. Years of effort to audit programmatic ad spending ran into conflicts of interest and collapsed before delivering definitive clarity. Critics worry agentic buying could repeat that pattern under a newer label.

The Reality: Still in the Experimental Stage

For all the announcements and pilots, agentic media buying remains tiny.

Bannister is candid about where things actually stand. Raptive has proof-of-concept tests running. The budgets being transacted are measured "in the dollars." "It's still super nascent, there's very little money being transacted," he said.

The Trade Desk's Jeff Green made a pointed argument on his Q1 2026 earnings call. He said building one-to-one connections between individual advertisers and individual publishers simply recreates an ad network, not a better system. "One advertiser connects to one publisher, and in doing so, you more or less create another ad network," Green told analysts. His view is that agentic buying only delivers real value at the scale of an open marketplace, not through bilateral tunnels.

Pierce Cook-Anderson of the Daily Mail captured the industry's divided mood: "It might be aspirational where we want to go to as an industry. I don't think we're there yet."

What Agentic Buying Cannot Fix

Even optimists acknowledge a harder truth. Neither Bannister nor Wohl believe agentic buying solves the open web's core problem. Platforms and AI systems are keeping users and content within their own surfaces while paying publishers less and less.

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"Previously, publishers gave their content away to platforms, and then they drove traffic back," Bannister said. "Now, platforms steal the content, and they don't send traffic out. That value exchange is broken."

Wohl is equally direct: "Sadly I don't inherently see this as a saving grace for publishers, not if they keep losing their audiences to generative AI alternatives to their websites. It can't change the traffic trajectories."

For Asian marketing leaders watching this debate, the practical message is simple. Agentic media buying may eventually reshape how ad budgets flow. Right now it is a series of small, messy experiments. The technology's potential is real. So is the risk that the same people benefiting from the old system will figure out how to benefit from the new one too.