Future of TV Briefing: How agencies are setting up their programmatic teams for the agentic AI era

More and more TV and streaming ad buying is being done programmatically. And more and more, AI agents are beginning to be integrated into programmatic advertising workflows. So it’s worthwhile for TV and streaming ad buyers to keep up with how programmatic organizations and their processes are adapting to this agentic AI era.

To that end, two on-stage interviews from last week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in New Orleans, La., are especially pertinent. In separate sessions with Horizon Media’s Monica Capelan and BarkleyOKRP’s Reshma Karnik, the executives explained how their respective agencies are organizing their teams and educating their employees to work alongside – and oversee – the AI tools being integrated into their workflows.

“The philosophy of the agency is everybody, top to bottom, has to use these agentic AI tools as a philosophy of the agency,” said Karnik, chief media officer at BarkleyOKRP. 

Horizon Media reorganized its programmatic team this year for a variety of reasons, but one of them was to ensure its employees had more hands-on experience with the tools powering the agency’s programmatic work. Previously split into two groups – one for planning and one for buying, each with roughly 40 to 50 employees – the agency consolidated them to a single programmatic team with sub-teams dedicated to specific client accounts.

“Now that we’ve consolidated the teams, now that we’re trying to bring AI and these different ways of working into our day to day, we are revamping all of our processes. And the first thing that we did is we decided that everybody needed hands-on-keyboard experience,” said Capelan, who is svp of programmatic at Horizon Media.

BarkleyOKRP reached a similar conclusion after the merger of Barkley and OKRP and acquisition of Adlucent in 2024. “You can imagine all these three agencies coming together, the melting pot that we are from a tools perspective, product perspective, talent perspective,” said Karnik, chief media officer at BarkleyOKRP. 

So the agency has implemented training programs to get its employees up to speed on these tools, such as by bringing in people from Google and The Trade Desk to run training sessions on their respective demand-side platform products. It has also developed internal “cross-training training programs for employees from different teams of the agency to come together to develop experience beyond their areas of expertise.

“The search folks only knew search. The programmatic folks only felt they knew programmatic. And the folks that only manage traditional [media] just knew that. The focus in the past four to five months is how do we cross-train? We essentially want all-rounders who don’t just look at activation, don’t just look at media planning and strategy, don’t just look at search. We want to have a holistic thought process. People who can see the whole map, the whole picture,” Karnik said.

And cross-discipline capability – and especially the hands-on experience – has emerged as a pretty crucial priority for agencies as they adopt AI tools. That became apparent in DPMS’s behind-closed-door town hall sessions, in which agency executives are granted anonymity in exchange for candor. During a discussion about incorporating AI tools into programmatic workflows, multiple participants made the point that for human employees to use these tools well, it helps if the employees have a handle on how they would do the tasks themselves (in addition to having a solid grasp of the AI tools’ capabilities and limitations).

“I would rather the people who have spent manual hours – trying to look at campaigns and optimize campaigns and switch between five platforms – use these AI tools to look at data holistically and intelligently use insights to make recommendations to clients strategically on how we need to navigate their accounts future-forward,” said Karnik.

Horizon Media, for example, has an AI tool called Agent Q that was developed on Google’s Gemini large language model. The agency’s programmatic team is using the tools to create AI agents, such as one that’s in development to help with campaign pacing and another for nomenclature checks. 

“Also we’re looking to see if we can figure out a way for us to just spot-check some of the main things within the DSP, whether it be budget, flight dates, timing, all that stuff. Because those are where sometimes a lot of those hands-on-keyboard errors come up,” Capelan said. 

But before these AI tools can become actually useful, employees need to ensure the data being fed into the tools is accurate, which is Horizon Media’s focus at the moment with an eye toward making these tools more generally available in January.

“We have a pacing report that’s sent to everybody every morning, and we want to make sure that certain things are coming through, like the CPM for the line item or making sure that something’s spending or on pace. So we’re trying to make sure that all of our nomenclature makes sense so that when the agent is reading it or looking through it, it’s not telling us the CPM is really way off because it’s a CTV line item and they think it’s a display one,” said Capelan, referring to CTV’s significantly higher ad prices compared to online display ads – which isn’t necessarily something an AI agent would know but a CTV ad buyer absolutely would.

What we’ve heard

“With the CTV ecosystem getting more fragmented, we were struggling to find a platform that gave us the efficiency, control and transparency that we wanted so we decided to build it ourselves.”

— PMG’s Doug Paladino on stage at last week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit

Numbers to know

$82.7 billion: How much Netflix will pay to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business.

303,000: Number of subscribers that pay-TV providers added in the third quarter of 2025 after accounting for subscriber losses.

90%: Percentage share of available ad slots in Telemundo’s 2026 FIFA World Cup coverage that have been sold so far.

What we’ve covered

PMG builds its own CTV buying platform:

• Called Alli Buyer Cloud, the platform is currently in alpha testing with three clients.
• The agency is looking to the platform to help reduce its buying fees.

Read more about PMG’s CTV platform here.

Nexxen is latest programmatic player to widen TV’s live sports window:

• The ad tech vendor is packaging up World Cup inventory to sell programmatically to advertisers.
• It’s unclear how Nexxen is sourcing that inventory.

Read more about Nexxen here.

WPP estimates commerce media spending to overtake TV this year:

• The agency holding company expects 14.6% of clients’ global ad spend in 2025 to have gone to TV and streaming, versus 15.6% that will have gone to commerce media.
• It’s unclear if money spent on Amazon Prime Video ads count as commerce media or TV/streaming.

Read more about TV ad spending here.

Here’s what the creator economy is expected to look like in 2026:

• Advertisers are expected to spend $43.9 billion with U.S. creators in 2026.
• More than half of that money will go toward promoting the content that brands pay creators to produce.

Read more about the creator economy here.

Publishers turn to vertical video to compete with creators and grow ad revenue in 2026:

• Publishers are adding vertical video products to their owned-and-operated properties, the TikTok version of their attempts to ape YouTube and Facebook last decade.
• A challenge for these publishers is the question of whether these vertical videos will count as in-stream or out-stream ad inventory.

Read more about publishers’ vertical video strategies here.

What we’re reading

Will Netflix actually end up with Warner Bros.?:

Netflix has agreed to acquired WBD’s studio and streaming businesses, but it is far from closing the acquisition, and this CNBC story breaks down the regulatory factors at play that could scuttle the deal.

Will Paramount actually end up with Warner Bros.?:

Not content to cede WBD to Netflix, Paramount Skydance has started wooing WBD shareholders by offering $108 billion in cash in a hostile takeover attempt, per CNBC.

Will Trump decide who ends up with Warner Bros.?:

Paramount leadership seems to certainly hope so, with Paramount CEO David Ellison’s dad Larry lamenting the Netflix announcement in a call to the president, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Will Hollywood walk out on Netflix if it ends up with Warner Bros.?:

The Writers Guild of America has come out in opposition to Netflix buying WB, and SAG-AFTRA has “serious questions,” per Variety, but will entertainment industry members actually take any action if the acquisition goes through?

Who will end up with CNN?:

The cable TV network is not part of Netflix’s purchase but will remain with the cable TV network business being spun off by WBD next year, though that company could become its own acquisition target, according to The New York Times.