Ad Tech Briefing: Agentic AI, interoperability and control dominate Cannes Lions announcements

If there was a single theme running through this year’s Cannes Lions ad tech announcements, it was the industry’s attempt to move beyond AI-assisted tools and toward agentic systems capable of making, coordinating, and executing advertising decisions.

Agency holding groups, ad tech vendors, and media companies all unveiled products aimed at automating workflows, connecting buyers and sellers, and creating the standards needed for AI agents to interact across the digital advertising ecosystem. 

Omnicom and Netflix combine audience data with AI creative

Omnicom Media unfurled a partnership with Netflix that combines Acxiom audience data, an asset it gained via way of its blockbuster merger with Interpublic Group, with Netflix’s advertising and AI capabilities. 

From here, it hopes to help advertisers create more relevant advertising experiences within streaming environments while improving measurement and performance analysis. It thus demonstrates how agency-owned data assets are increasingly being paired with AI-generated creative and premium streaming inventory.

WPP Media seeks standards for agentic buying

WPP Media announced a Buyer Agent for video alongside an agentic standards initiative involving major broadcasters, streaming platforms, and industry bodies. The goal is to establish technical and governance standards for how buyer and seller agents interact in premium video environments. Participants include Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Comcast Advertising, IAB Tech Lab, and Prebid. 

Elsewhere, governance, interoperability, and transparency were recurring themes as companies sought to reassure buyers that greater automation would not come at the expense of control.

Amazon’s AI-powered workflows

Amazon Ads used the conference to showcase a series of AI-driven enhancements designed to automate campaign planning, optimization, and creative execution. The updates are intended to reduce operational complexity for advertisers while encouraging greater use of Amazon’s advertising ecosystem. The announcement reflects the e-commerce giant’s push to frame itself as both a media platform and an AI-enabled marketing infrastructure provider.

Index Exchange backs cultural targeting

Meanwhile, Index Exchange partnered with Culture Hive and Subjective to launch autonomous cultural optimization for premium CTV campaigns. 

The offering uses cultural signals and AI-driven decisioning to help advertisers align campaigns with audience interests and behaviors in real time. 

Zeta expands AI agents into agency workflows

Zeta Global used Cannes Lions to expand its Athena AI platform further into agency operations, with Stagwell among its launch partners.

The move reflects increasing competition among marketing technology providers to become the intelligence layer that sits above media execution platforms.

Magnite’s agent-to-agent advertising

Magnite introduced Magnite Orchestration, a framework designed to facilitate interactions between buyer agents and seller agents across premium advertising inventory. The system is intended to support automated campaign planning, inventory discovery, and transaction workflows. 

Magnite is using the launch to position itself as a provider of infrastructure for the emerging agentic advertising market, where software agents rather than humans increasingly manage elements of media trades.

PubMatic brings creators into CTV

PubMatic unveiled Creator Marketplace, a programmatic marketplace designed to connect creator-led media businesses with advertiser demand and automated buying systems. 

By making creator inventory more accessible through programmatic channels, PubMatic aims to bridge the gap between the creator economy and traditional digital advertising workflows. The initiative also reflects the growing importance of connected TV as a destination for creator content.

Smartly’s orchestration layer 

Smartly launched Synapse, an AI orchestration and memory layer designed to coordinate the activities of its various AI agents. 

Rather than focusing on a single automation tool, the company is developing a system to manage context, decision-making, and performance data across multiple marketing functions. The announcement illustrates how vendors are increasingly focused on connecting AI tools together rather than deploying them in isolation.

The bigger picture

Taken together, the announcements suggest the industry is entering a new phase of AI adoption, with the conversation shifting away from individual AI features and toward the infrastructure required to operate autonomous systems at scale. 

Whether through orchestration layers, buyer agents, creator marketplaces, or interoperability standards, the common objective is evidently to enable AI systems to transact, optimize, and collaborate across the industry supply chain while maintaining sufficient transparency and governance for marketers to trust them.

What we heard

“The announcements next week at Cannes are going to really pile up!  Everyone will all of a sudden now have an end-to-end agentic solution.” – An industry WhatsApp group participant shares a tacit PoV on the industry’s herd mentality.  

Numbers to know

• $63.9 billion: WPP Media remained the world’s largest media holding group by billings in 2025
• $62.4 billion: Publicis Media ranked second globally and was the fastest-growing major holding group
• $48.5 billion: Omnicom Media Group ranked third worldwide with a 10% market share, although the figure excludes IPG’s Mediabrands
• $27.1 billion: IPG Mediabrands ranked fourth as a standalone holding group prior to its integration into Omnicom

Source: COMvergence Full-Year 2025 Global Billings & Market Share report

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