Why CNN International is building for agentic ad market that barely exists yet

Beyond the timeline, the network has shared little about the agent itself. What’s on record is that it’s building in-house agentic infrastructure alongside third-party tech and vendors such as demand-side platforms. The plan then was to finish scoping the protocols by the end of the second quarter, test how one or two properties are read by LLMs in the third and look at buyer behaviour and budget allocation in the fourth. Early use cases would centre on performance campaigns before widening out. So far that plan appears to be on schedule. 

“In terms of switching it on to then go and trade we’re not there yet, but I’m happy to see [as CNN] how that looks to a buy side agent to see what it’s looking for and what that path potentially looks like,” said Karmali.

He gave the update on stage at Digiday’s Media Strategies event in London last week, where he made clear his team is focused on building something it can take to market before it goes out chasing deals. Most of the conversationals so far have been technology partners and as he put it, “there’s a lot to be done”. 

That’s because what CNN International is building is far from straightforward. The broadcaster is pairing its own agent infrastructure with outside technology partners and lining it up with industry frameworks, which means teaching an agent CNN International’s business rules, giving it a front end and making sure its inventory reads correctly to the large language models buyers’ agents rely on. All of that has to work with a buy side building its own systems in parallel, with two competing standards that overlap on 13 functions and no agreed way yet to stop agents gaming the system. 

“I feel like both sides need to talk while they’re building their platforms,” said Karmali. “At the moment, everything gets built in silos, and then we have to figure out how to connect it in the middle. I’m hoping that this can be solved by actual conversations, which is happening, and there are facilitators of that.”

More often than not those conversations circle back to how the agents will talk to each other once they’re out in the wild. What guardrails stop them from circumventing trading practices? Which vocabulary do they use to broker a deal given there are standards competing to be it? Then there’s the issues of who divides what quality inventory looks like, how a buyer’s agent checks if the seller’s agent is authorized to sell in the first place and who carries the can when an agent misreads a brief and spends money anyway. 

Any one of those is hard enough to answer. Together they make a game of jenga, where settling one question tends to loosen the others. CNN International thinks the game is worth playing anyway, with an eye on the dollars agent-to-agent trading could bring in a few years from now. What it brings in next year is a smaller concern. As Karmali explained: “We know we have a clean environment with human-made fact-check content that has a clean metadata layer that we can ensure that gets packaged in the correct way.”

That’s the prize for publishers: more say over how their inventory is sold and what it sells for. The catch is that a buyer’s agent never sees CNN’s ad execs, only how their inventory is described, and the industry has yet to agree what an accurate description looks like. Until it does, CNN International’s provenance is only worth as much as the next agent’s ability to read it. Karmali explained: “From an agent perspective, in terms of exposure of the layer beyond MCP and looking at kind of a common language for us to trade with agencies, DSPs and clients directly, I think that’s the important bit.”

Without that clarity, revenue will be hard to come by. Advertisers aren’t exactly chomping at the bit for another way to buy ads, least of all one that risks importing programmatic’s old problems into a new pipe. 

“Seller agents are a genuine efficiency gain for direct sales,” said Ravi Patel, CEO of SWYM, an ad tech startup that provides programmatic decisioning and media supply curation tools for advertisers and agencies. “They take cost out of the RFP-to-trafficking grind. But they automate the deal, not the delivery. Performance is decided impression by impression, in milliseconds, on bid-request signals. Connect those two layers and you’ve got something. Otherwise you’ve automated the paperwork, not the performance.”

What it all adds up to is anyone’s guess, Karmali’s included. He wouldn’t say whether agents could tip the balance of power back toward publishers, calling it “too early to say” and was just as loose on revenue. Agent-led deals could start at 5% of CNN International’s ad business, he said, or one day reach 50%. “There’s still a path to go”, he added.

CNN International, like so many of its counterparts, has spent the past few years spreading its journalists across new outlets and following the data on where it pays. Each new one gets tested against the audience numbers before the network commits to it.

Its FAST channels now run in 50 countries, including CNN Headlines, a channel stitched together from clips it already publishes online. The CNN All Access subscription went live in the U.K. and Canada earlier this week (October 20) with ads built in from the start. Then there’s Global Perspectives, an editorially led events series that has staged four sponsor-funded gatherings in its first year, from Davos to Bangkok. Karmali called it “almost the antithesis of agentic”.