End-to-end agentic ad campaigns are no longer hypothetical; they’re in market.
For publishers that have struggled to activate their first-party data, AI agents offer a more automated and bespoke approach to deal curation that wasn’t possible before.
PubMatic and Optable are both productizing this shift with agentic tech and collaborating on a new end-to-end workflow for AgenticOS, which is PubMatic’s framework for connecting buy-side and sell-side AI agents.
The integration connects Optable’s sell-side agent, which packages first-party publisher data into audiences based on a campaign brief, with PubMatic’s buyer agent, which ingests the prompts – a new role for a company that previously positioned itself as a pure-play SSP.
Until recently, agentic tech was used mainly to automate direct-sold campaigns. PubMatic has itself completed more than 1,000 such deals. But now, agentic solutions are starting to show up in curated programmatic private marketplace (PMP) deals, too, said Abbie Reichner, PubMatic’s VP of customer success.
The Optable integration has powered roughly half of the 30 or so agentic programmatic campaigns that have run through PubMatic’s platform so far.
This type of integration allows publishers to agentically curate completely new audiences tailored to specific campaigns, said Charlie Morris, VP of partnerships and data strategy at publisher ad network Mediavine.
Publishers can “unlock a data asset that’s been there but untapped for quite some time,” he said.
Tapping the data asset
Publishers have been hearing for years that their first-party data is a valuable and underutilized asset, Morris said, but the process of curating audiences using first-party data was until very recently a largely manual task that fell heavily on ad ops and sales teams.
Ad ops had to find and tag enough inventory to align to specific curated deal IDs and deliver the expected scale, while sales personnel had to go out into the market to make buyers aware of these curated audiences.
That process started to become more automated over the past couple of years as the sell-side curation trend picked up steam, Morris said. SSPs and DSPs launched curation marketplaces to help publishers scale their efforts and activate more curated deals both directly and programmatically. Now, he said, platforms are layering agentic tech on top of curated deals to create more tailored audiences that publishers may not even know are in demand.
But rather than replacing sales or ad ops with AI, Mediavine sees an opportunity to help them do more and work more efficiently, Morris said.
By plugging into PubMatic’s existing customer base, he said, “discoverability can happen in real time without us deploying a massive sales team to educate every agency on how we’re coming to market agentically.”
“Through partnerships,” he added, “we are going to be able to cover a lot more ground quickly, and we hope that our audiences will scale at a much greater rate than if you have to match them to inventory through IDs.”
Proving publisher value
Because Mediavine already uses Optable as its data management platform, the latter could easily ingest data from Mediavine’s network of more than 18,000 publishers.
Through its sales agent, Optable surfaces all of that audience data – whether its custom event-level data or prepackaged audiences in a taxonomy – which PubMatic’s buyer agent can query in real time, said Andrew Dumas, chief business officer at Optable.
The idea, he said, is to expose data “in any way, shape or form that a buyer would want to see it.”
Mediavine is also using Optable’s audience agent to integrate directly with the buy-side agents being built by agencies and some brands, Morris said. But he noted that going through an end-to-end approach like PubMatic’s brings a whole new source of scaled programmatic demand.
Another example comes from gaming.
Livewire, an ad network for gaming properties that sells inventory in mobile, PC and console games, is also testing the PubMatic/Optable integration. These types of solutions are finally letting publishers prove the value of the data assets they’ve invested so much in building, said Indy Khabra, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO, pointing to Livewire’s Gamer.ID.
Having that kind of proof could shift the conversation about agentic tech more toward what the sell side can bring to the table.
“A lot of the AI narrative is very much demand-oriented,” Khabra said. “But I think you’re going to see more conversations balancing the demand and the activation side with the supply side going forward.
What’s in demand
Speaking of demand, agentic approaches are helping publishers tap incremental revenue streams.
Some buyers are already dedicating budgets to testing agentic AI solutions, said Mediavine’s Morris. But even in cases where buyers don’t have a dedicated AI budget, they might be inclined to divert spend to agentic activation paths to prove they’re staying up to date with evolving tech.
Ad agencies “have to go back to the brand and say, ‘This is what we’re doing to represent you and find new, exciting opportunities,’” Morris said. Agentic buying has quickly become one of those proof points.
“Being able to move quickly in that space is something that agencies will be able to hang their hat on,” he added, although, for the time being at least, he predicts that agencies are more likely to divert direct-buy budgets to agentic activation, rather than programmatic budgets.
That said, Livewire’s Khabra sees agentic solutions as a way to get gaming included in more omnichannel programmatic campaigns.
But no matter how advertisers prefer to buy inventory, he added, it’s important for publishers to integrate with agentic partners so they can cover as many preferred supply paths as possible.
Not that offering an agentic buying path is only beneficial to publishers. It’s also helping SSPs stand out in a commoditized market.
For example, Morris said Mediavine has been testing several sell-side agents and audience curation solutions from different SSPs, but PubMatic is one of the first SSPs to offer a buy-side tool that pulls in those audiences.
“PubMatic has really leaned into the buyer agent, which is filling a pretty big need right now, because there’s a lot of people on the seller agent side,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of activity here.”
