• by Joe Mandese , November 6, 2025

Or maybe it's a pivot swiveling yet again. Either way, an ad tech brand I never heard of until it burst on the scene enabling what may have been the ad industry's first end-to-end agentic media buy, this morning announced it is pivoting its brand identity for the second time this year. As someone who receives a lot of company rebranding pitches, I often struggle to understand what the rebrand actually is. So I asked Swivel CEO Joe Hirsch to elaborate.

Media 3.0: In what way has Swivel rebranded itself, explicitly, and how does that differ from what its brand was originally?

Joe Hirsch: In April, we announced our rebranding from PilotDesk to Swivel to reflect a shift in both ambition and capabilities. The name “Swivel” nods to the taxing “swivel-chairing” that ops teams experience when working in disconnected systems. Our mission has always been to eliminate that friction.

We began as an intelligent automation layer for ad ops but now represent a broader, more strategic remit of deploying agents to orchestrate entire workflows at a speed, scale, and accuracy that no human team can match. As we evolve our solutions– especially with the introduction of our seller agent– we realized we needed language and a visual vocabulary that better depict the agentic future we’re helping to define.

Media 3.0: Why are you launching a new brand identity and why now?

Hirsch: Timing-wise, it’s driven by two things. First, our product capabilities have expanded far beyond where we began. We’ve built an entire platform that spans pre-sales RFP automations, campaign setup, trafficking, yield and delivery optimizations, analytics, and now agent-to-agent execution through our seller agent.

Second, the market is ready for the agentic era in a way it wasn’t when we were founded. The resounding success of the AdCP launch made clear the industry is moving towards agentic execution. We needed our branding to reflect that we’re helping drive that shift, as evidenced by our founding membership in the AdCP consortium.

Media 3.0: MediaPost had never covered Swivel until the AdCP launch a few weeks ago. We referred to you as a publishing ad server. Your release describes you as an "agentic orchestration layer for modern ad operations," which is a mouthful. What does that mean in plain English? What do you actually do?

Hirsch: Swivel is not an ad server– nor do we aspire to be. In plain English, we eliminate the swivel-chair work that bogs down ad ops teams. 

Ad ops teams spend their days logging into countless platforms– such as ad servers, SSPs, and DMPs– copying data, making adjustments, checking performance, and ensuring that their strategies are carried through uniformly and accurately. It’s tedious, error-prone, repetitive work that doesn’t scale. So we purpose-built AI agents that work for them, 24/7/365, operating within the rules and guardrails that the teams define.

So, instead of an ad operator manually adjusting floor prices during their working hours based on lagging data, our agent does it automatically, in real time, based on the logic they’ve set. Instead of manually setting up campaigns across multiple platforms, our agents handle it. Humans delegate execution to the agents so they are free to test and define new strategies to unlock revenue and efficiency.

“Orchestration layer” means Swivel sits between your team and all of those disparate platforms, coordinating actions across them as well as coordinating with other agents in the ecosystem via AdCP. 

Media 3.0: Can you give an elevator version of your origin story and how it led to how you are branding yourself now?

Hirsch: Our founding team also founded SpringServe, so we know what it takes to build mission-critical infrastructure in ad tech, and we know the limits of it too.

SpringServe solved for ad serving speed, flexibility, and control in a programmatic ecosystem. But even with such an intelligent solution, human operators are still left manually creating, trafficking, optimizing, and analyzing campaigns across their various systems.

We started by automating the repetitive ops work in SpringServe, like price floors, QPS allocation, prioritization, pacing, and budget shifts. The real breakthrough came when we began to orchestrate across systems, deploying a network of coordinated agents to replicate, scale, and improve the decisions hands-on-keyboard users make in those platforms everyday.

And that’s where we are today: Swivel is the agentic orchestration layer that unifies and improves ad operations across the entire stack.

Media 3.0: During your Oct. 15 live agentic media buy, you/your agent played the supply-side role interacting with Scope3/and its agent. Is that an accurate example of your agentic orchestration layer: enabling publishers to trade agentically with advertisers/agencies/agents representing the demand-side?

Hirsch: Yes. On the AdCP demo, I operated Swivel’s seller agent on behalf of our customer, LG Ad Solutions, and trafficked the deal into their SpringServe instance. That demo shows our vision and our new reality: buy and sell side agents transacting without human bottlenecks. And that’s what agentic orchestration enables: the next generation of media trading where systems execute strategy aligned with operator intent.