Media agencies test AI planning agents, while edging toward buying tools
AI agents have become a focal point for media agencies and brands hoping to move AI tech past potential and into practical benefit.
Agencies across the industry, from giants like WPP to indie shop Mediassociates have already begun using agents in an advisory capacity; they’ve developed programs that can make audience-segment suggestions based on client briefs, run competitor analyses or suggest potential search keywords.
But an agent that can actually execute a buy represents a step across the Rubicon for agencies. It’s one thing to trust ChatGPT to place an order for your Christmas shopping, but quite another to trust an LLM-derived program to handle bids worth thousands of dollars.
That doesn’t mean agencies aren’t working to push the envelope.
Indie shop Butler/Till, for example, has been testing a media activation agent in partnership with Scope3. According to vp of channel activation Ryan Lammela, it’s been testing a buying agent developed by Scope3. In basic terms, that agent — built using Anthropic’s Claude model — interacts with a counterpart agent developed by supply-side firm Pubmatic in order to activate a media buy. Both use the AdCP protocol.
The process cuts out the use of a DSP and other ad tech “middlemen”, Lammela said: “It’s [an] opportunity to skip a lot of the wastefulness, bid duplication, even DMPs potentially – all the ad tech players in the middle of that process that are taking their cut.”
Beginning in October, Butler/Till devoted an eight-person team to the project, with the aim of delivering a 40% reduction in the costs associated with executing a media plan. He said the agency also hoped that, in time, an agentic activation route would enable faster campaign optimization and more accurate selection of quality media placements. The tests, which began in early December, involve placing small media buys, using contextual targeting, via Pubmatic.
“It’s a totally new way of doing things,” said Tim Collier, chief commercial officer at Scope3. He told Digiday that Scope3 was currently partnering on several pilot projects (in the “low single digits”) before unveiling a cohort of more advanced pilot projects with unnamed publishers, advertisers and agencies this coming February. Collier didn’t name the other companies working with Scope3, but its partners include Omnicom Media Group and TikTok.
“This is a new space, and we want to get it right and we want to make sure that we develop with a very small amount of companies… it’s kind of too big a thing to rush into,” he said.
Solutions that offer media planning assistance, rather than buying or activation, are farther beyond the experimental phase. Buyers at Omnicom and Kinesso (now under one roof) are testing advanced planning agents developed by ad server platform Equativ, that can help guide media strategy and take traders all the way up to the point of a bid.
Built to use Equativ’s Maestro platform (the firm operates both a DSP and SSP), the agent can evaluate campaign briefs and make planning recommendations. In addition to those capabilities the agent can generate PMP deals, including “bundles” of different campaign deals, within a buyer’s chosen DSP, according to Equativ CMO Ben Skinazi. “Once the deal is built, well, you can operate that deal directly in the DSP of your choice,” he explained.
Equativ claimed the system can cut planning time down by up to 40%. In a statement, Kristina Craig, deputy director of investment and accountability at Omnicom Media, said the system “[unlocks] an entirely new way of structuring programmatic buys. Instead of relying on siloed auctions, the AI agent automatically gathers different campaign deals for easy measurement.”
Equativ’s efforts aren’t isolated. Yahoo’s DSP is reportedly testing six AI agents developed for campaign optimization and measurement, for example.
Microsoft’s vp of telco, media and gaming Silvia Candiani expects more to come. She said 2026 will see companies across the marketing world catch up with “frontier firms” experimenting with agents now.
“Those companies are leading with that more modern way of embracing AI [and] are reaping the benefits,” she said. Microsoft itself has developed 6,000 agents atop its Copilot platform, she added.
But further developments in the new year will likely bring scrutiny into the promises made by ad tech’s AI boosters, as well as debates over whether AI agents should be used for media activation at all.
Just as filmmakers and art directors across the industry question how much of their jobs should be automated, media execs debate just how much control over the buying and activation role they should delegate away to an AI program. Digiday’s Tim Peterson strawpolled media execs on the topic during our latest Programmatic Marketing Summit in New Orleans.
“I think when it comes to programmatic activations, we’re not trusting that to large language model-based agents,” Christopher Francia, director of product development and client performance at Attention Arc, told him.
Though agencies aren’t throwing caution to the wind, they’re willing to put that trust (or lack thereof) to the test. For his part, Scope3’s Collier said he believes the use of media-buying agents is a “foregone conclusion.”
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