• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 12, 2025

Oliver Feldwick, chief innovation officer at WPP-owned agency T&Pm, can't exactly say what systems and protocols will look like for agentic technology by the end of this year, but it’s pretty clear advertising will go through seismic changes that will have a major impact in monetization and the way brands market to consumers.

Feldwick has been working with artificial intelligence (AI) for years. He’s “enthusiastic” about what is to come in the agentic age, after working on several projects like an AI-scripted ad for Lexus in 2018.

More recently Feldwick helped lead Snickers’ "Mourinho's Own Goal No Nos” ad that allowed fans to send personalized, AI-generated video messages from soccer coach Jose Mourinho to their friends. As part of a team, he also worked to develop WPP’s AI platform, WPP Open. 

Agentic will become a major disrupter across advertising in many ways -- ranging from monetization across the web to how brands will advertise to agents, Feldwick said. "I think we are in a similar inflection point" as 20 years ago, he added.

What follows are excerpts from a conversation between Feldwick and MediaPost, in which he compares the many unexpected and unintended consequences of digital during the past 20 years with the agentic transformation occurring today.

MediaPost: How will agentic technology affect display, search, video and other types of media across the internet?

Feldwick:  The way brands turn up in agentic systems and AI models has already begun to impact recommendations. We broadly know how to navigate search engine optimization (SEO), but now we are turning to generative summaries and not having to click one link.

You can see it cuts out a huge amount of control that brands had. We will start looking at the signals that speak to the agents in content and data.

We could potentially create content for agents rather than humans. [It makes it interesting because Google has long said to create content for humans not machines.]

Inherently the digital revolution had been ad-funded, whereas that’s not the same pattern playing out with AI. Potentially it could substantially displace advertising.

MP:  How will the industry fund the internet if not for advertising?

Feldwick:  It will disrupt lots of elements to different parts of the economy. In the long term, it could have far-reaching implications on productivity, utilities, and more.

In terms of funding, agent-to-agent recommendations could work in a way analogous to SEO. The role of advertising will be to get the brand call to the agent, so it will shift priorities and focus — less on the functional and more toward entertainment and learning. Recommendations will play an essential role.

MP:  How quickly will this change happen?

Feldwick:  If you look back to the dot.com bubble, buying pet food online was a radical thought. These are profound shifts and there are reasons to think this will happen at a faster pace.

MP:  To make decisions, will agents pull in additional data related to the consumer from across the web?

Feldwick:  Agents that can browse the internet and use a variety of software could, potentially, pull in data from different sources, or brief another agent to do a task.

When you’re looking at data layers and architectures on ways to plug in closed datasets, as well as reading personal documents will have privacy implications.

It’s more around safeguards and protocols on how these agents will connect, and no one today has a common interoperability idea on how it will work.

MP:  Looking back at 2025 in a couple of years from now, will you call this year the year of the agent?

Feldwick:  You will see practical and logistical barriers this year that will stop us from achieving the full power of agents, but it feels very much like it will be this year and next.

The idea when we look back at how we used single-use language models for a response will feel old fashioned in 18 months.

Even some of the deep research capabilities where you write a prompt, and a series of things happen, will change. We will see a bigger shift in the next 18 months.