Originally announced in December, PubMatic released the results of its very first agentic campaign yesterday.
The company utilized its agent-to-agent advertising operating system known as AgenticOS, which was launched at CES in January. Independent media agency Butler/Till managed the budget for marketer Geloso Beverage Group and its Clubtails product.
On LinkedIn yesterday, PubMatic revealed, “Butler/Till and Geloso Beverage Group saw 82% lower buy-side costs, 40% more impressions, and 30% lower CPMs, without sacrificing quality or reach.”
“Buy-side costs”, i.e. ad tech intermediary fees.
In promoting the study, Kyle Dozeman, PubMatic CRO, Americas, promised on LinkedIn, “We have a bunch more campaigns running and will be sharing further results on an ongoing basis, including more specific performance outcomes.”
Digiday’s Sam Bradley outlined the agentic workflow in his article:
“In basic terms, the process used in the test consisted of a series of messages pinged back and forth between the agency’s Claude agent, and PubMatic’s own agentic systems:
- An agent built using Anthropic’s Claude LLM communicated what kinds of ads and which audiences to target in PubMatic’s AgenticOS system, based on a client brief written by human staff.
- A PubMatic agent retrieved curated ad inventory, which was then relayed back to the agency staff team for approval.
- Butler/Till’s agent confirmation was sent back to AgenticOS, and the remainder of the media purchase was handled by PubMatic’s existing tech chain.”
Read: “Butler/Till’s first agentic media buying tests cut media and supply chain costs” (March 17) – Digiday (subscription)
Regarding the Digiday story, PayPal Ads Lead Product Manager Freddy Porges commented on LinkedIn:
“It’s not clear from the article how the agentic workflow directly led to cutting out intermediary costs. This workflow here was using PubMatic as both the buy-side / sell-side tech so it seems more likely that that was the forcing function in the reduction of those costs vs. the agentic stack.”
See it on LinkedIn. (March 17)
From December: The initial results: “How AI agents planned the media buy for a beverage brand’s CTV campaign” (December 16) – Ad Age (subscription)
From tipsheet: It may have been a small ‘test’ budget (the budget was not shared), but you have to start somewhere.
How fast and how big can this scale? Mr. Dozeman promised it’s all in the works and Digiday reported “‘upwards of 10’ agency partners” have signed aboard.
The ability to facilitate agent-to-agent buying through an automated process versus today’s more hands-on reality will be key.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Introducing Forge (March 17) – Mistral
- Announcing Copilot leadership update (March 17) – Microsoft blog
- Court temporarily allows Perplexity AI shopping ‘agents’ on Amazon (March 17) – Reuters (subscription)
AGENCIES
The Trade Desk and Publicis face-off
According to Ad Age, The Trade Desk is coming under pressure from agency holding company Publicis.
From yesterday:
“Publicis Groupe is telling clients it will no longer recommend The Trade Desk as a demand-side platform for digital media buying following a recently completed audit. The holding company is telling clients that the audit it commissioned revealed multiple violations of the master service agreement it has in place with The Trade Desk.”
Ad Age’s Chief Technology Reporter Garett Sloane parsed the news on LinkedIn:
“TTD has also faced stiffer competition from Amazon, which were all about pressure on DSP fees, an area TTD can’t really compete. Amazon can do the discount model.
Agencies have also complained about how TTD has turned on certain automations to campaigns, especially with Kokai, its AI handling more decisions. Some agencies have pulled back from parts of TTD’s offerings, such as OpenPath, but none has said what Publicis said here.”
Read more on LinkedIn. (March 17)
Read: “Publicis no longer recommends The Trade Desk to clients following audit” (March 17) – Ad Age (subscription)
More: “Publicis Advises Clients to Avoid The Trade Desk, According to a Leaked Memo” (March 17) – Adweek
From tipsheet: Beyond the MSA disagreement, this is further signal on a margin ‘war’ as technology platforms encroach on agency services.
AI is transforming both sides of the MSA, too. As a result, the threat to large services-led businesses in advertising could push them to the ‘walled gardens.’ The big tech platforms are less interested in carrying the cost of agency services and going direct to the marketer, but do want marketer budgets pouring through their ad platforms.
AGENCIES
The Trade Desk responds: Jeff Green
Last night, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green posted on LinkedIn that — from his perspective — he did not believe his company had failed any audit as asserted in the Publicis memo.
He began:
“When Dave Pickles and I started TTD, we wanted to create a platform that was more transparent and more aligned with buyers. We wanted to create closer alignment with brands and agencies. We were one of the few DSPs that didn’t focus on disintermediating the agencies.
I stand by our choice to partner with agencies. I stand by our choice to be transparent, even though I think we at times have been too open (as I shared at Marketecture Media last week).
Over the last year or two, things have gotten much harder for agencies.
Lately it seems that there are those who want to wave the flag of transparency publicly, but run from it in practice as they arbitrage in the inefficiencies of programmatic. Or in the most ironic programmatic practice, principal-based buying. (More on this next week. I know…I’m such a tease.)
It bothers me when leaders of non-transparent business models are critical of those of us who are setting the bar—especially when they advocate for moving dollars to more opaque platforms and transaction methods…”
Read more from Green on LinkedIn. (March 17)
From tipsheet: Make note of his “principal-based buying” tease – more coming next week. Will keep you posted.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Google’s Personal Intelligence and ads
Google’s Personal Intelligence product is “expanding in the U.S. across AI Mode in Search, the Gemini app and Gemini in Chrome.”
(Back in January, Google had rolled out Personal Intelligence for AI Mode in Search to AI Pro and AI Ultra users.)
Google’s The Keyword blog explained yesterday, “Personal Intelligence allows you to securely connect the dots across your Google apps — like Gmail, Google Photos and more — to provide responses that are uniquely relevant to you.”
Read: “Bringing the power of Personal Intelligence to more people” (March 17) – Google
Search Engine Land covered the news and inquired about whether ads will intersect with Personal Intelligence.
A Google spokesperson responded:
- “There are currently no ads for people who choose to connect their apps with AI Mode. That isn’t changing right now.”
- “Over the past few months, we’ve been testing ads in AI Mode in the US. Our tests have shown that people find these connections to businesses helpful and open up new opportunities to discover products and services.”
- “In the future, we anticipate that ads will operate similarly for people who choose to connect their apps with AI Mode. Ads will continue to be relevant to things like your query, the context of the response and your interests.”
Search Engine Land’s Anu Adegbola observed, “Personal Intelligence positions Google’s Gemini app as a more personalized assistant, setting the stage for future ad experiences built on richer, cross-platform user context.”
Read more. (March 17)
From tipsheet: Imagine the addressability with Personal Intelligence.
And yes, I can see the downside, but users would be signaling what they want better than ever. And if what they want is privacy, so be it.
TECH
‘A Blueprint for Agentic Advertising’
In a new thought leadership piece on the Mediaocean blog titled, “A Blueprint for Agentic Advertising,” Mediaocean executive Ramsey McGrory revealed new positioning for Mediaocean and Prisma’s back office pipes (was MediaBank/Donovan): the center of the agentic transformation of advertising.
“In a world where many AI systems are aligned to a single walled garden, buyers will insist on a control layer that works across partners and channels without hidden incentives. Neutrality becomes a stronger feature. Supporting third-party agents while building native ones is the right posture: let innovation happen at the edges, but keep execution grounded in governed workflows. Smaller advertisers may not require this; the largest mandate this…”
Read: “A Blueprint for Agentic Advertising” (March 17) – Ramsey McGrory on Mediaocean’s blog
From tipsheet: “Agentic advertising” meets “vertical advertising” at Mediaocean.
TECH
The ‘power worker’ benefits of agentic
Yahoo DSP General Manager Adam Roodman joins Mike Shield’s Next in Media podcast to discuss a range of topics including where the demand-side platform is heading with agentic advertising.
Mr. Roodman discussed differences between agentic and programmatic (lightly edited):
“What programmatic sped up was the act of bidding on 2000 sites instead of having to transact and that kind of stuff. The support and use case of that for analytics, trading, management, reporting and trafficking, that is still a lot of work. It created some new workflows that we didn’t have pre-programmatic.
Agentic comes at a time to address the workflow. Some of the most boring use cases for Model Context Protocol is usage around trafficking are going to be the biggest time savers.
Programmatic was never sold as a time-saving mechanism. (…) Agentic is changing the output of a power worker today. And if the output goes up, then it changes what these power workers are capable of…”
Listen: “How Yahoo DSP is Winning The Identity and CTV Wars with Adam Roodman” (March 17) – Next in Media on Apple Podcasts app
Related: “The Gap Between the Promise and Reality of CTV” – Viant SVP Keith Petri on his blog
MEASUREMENT
GEO integrated into commerce platform
Appealing to his DTC clientele, Fermat Commerce CEO and Co-Founder Rishabh Jain announced new “AI Search” optimization capabilities for his commerce platform. The company first launched its “AI Search” product late last year.
Mr. Jain explained on LinkedIn:
“Every AI search tool can show you where you’re losing visibility. That part is table stakes now.
The question is: what happens after you see the gap?
With Fermat’s new Opportunities Dashboard, the answer is — you close it.
The system surfaces the highest-impact AI search gaps each week, then auto-generates the content to fill them to go from insight to live in one click.”
See a screenshot on LinkedIn. (March 17)
From tipsheet: If you are an ad tech or retail media firm with a view on the purchase funnel, AEO/GEO may be a product ready for your company to develop.
Related: “Reddit Ads will integrate into Pacvue’s Commerce Operating System, making it easier for enterprise teams to activate and optimize Reddit alongside retail media in a single governed platform.” (March 17) – Melissa Burdick, President, Pacvue on LinkedIn
LLMs & CHATBOTS
More ad tech for OpenAI?
“The deprioritization of OpenAI’s consumer business also means that the fledgling ad business will likely be put on the back burner. They might decide to stay with partners’ sales and AdTech resources instead of developing their own in-house capabilities.”
Read: OpenAI to Cut Back on Side Projects in Push to ‘Nail’ Core Business (March 16) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
SELL-SIDE
Small publisher traffic and search
Reviewing new website traffic data from analytics firm Chartbeat, Axios’ Sara Fischer discovered that small publishers are suffering the most when it comes to declines in search referral traffic. Courtesy of Chartbeat, she observed: “Smaller web publishers, with 1,000–10,000 daily page views, are experiencing the most precipitous traffic declines in the AI era,
And yet, large publishers are coping. Fischer explained:
“The data suggests bigger and more sophisticated publishers are finding new ways to mitigate search traffic declines, which has helped temper the overall rate of page view declines on the internet.
Search traffic for news and media sites, in particular, is being partially offset by new referral channels, such as direct traffic and internal traffic, or traffic that comes from a different page on the same website.”
Read: “Small publishers hit hardest by search traffic declines” (March 17) – Axios
MORE
- 2026 Commerce & AI Trend Report (March 17) – Criteo
- “Private credit and the AI value reallocation” (March 17) – Eric Seufert, analyst, Mobile Dev Memo (subscription)
- “Beyond Product Market Fit: Five Critical Fits for AI-Era Startups” (March 13) – Omar Tawakol, GP, Superset and CEO, Rembrand on AI Journal
- “How LLMs are reshaping the publisher ecosystem — and what comes next“ (March 17) – Jason Fairchild, CEO, tvScientific on Beehiiv
- “Amazon CEO sees AI doubling prior AWS sales projections to $600 billion by 2036“ (March 17) – Reuters (subscription)