• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

When we -- or our agents -- look back on the beginning of the agentic epoch of advertising and media services, I think even the machines among us will marvel at how quickly it evolved.

Less than three months after the first public agentic media buy was executed live for all to witness, just about every entity on the buy and sell sides is racing to implement their own autonomous, agentic media-buying platforms.

This morning, it was supply-side platform (SSP) giant PubMatic, which just unveiled its aptly named "AgenticOS" for "agent-to-agent" media buys.

The demo video above illustrates the incredibly simple step-by-step process, beginning with a basic prompt on Claude, or another LLM, and within a few manual refinements, PubMatic's agent presents an executable buy.

Needless to say, human planners and buyers and advertisers are still in that mix in the sense that they are initiating and customizing the process -- and ultimately approving the final execution, but everything else is compiled and processed by the agent.

The rollout -- which is backed by some big demand-side partners including WPP Media, Butler/Till and WPromote -- further blurs the line defining PubMatic as a "SSP" vs. a "DSP," and may even fulfill its ultimate goal of truly being an exchange or marketplace, but it also seems like the next logical progression for an engineer of programmatic media buying and selling services.

But it's pretty clear to me that whatever is going on in the back end, the front end of PubMatic's AgenticOS system is designed for planners and buyers, which is probably the right way to usher in the next generation of autonomous planning and buying systems. You know, the best technology should essentially be invisible to the user, right?

I for one cannot envision what the next iteration of agentic media-buying will bring -- but at least for now, it's nice to know that humans still are in the loop, even if we call it an agent-to-agent process.

Addendum: On Tuesday morning, after this column was originally published, NBCUniversal and independent Santa Monica-based agency RPA unveiled a new agetnic media-buying system for purchasing premium inventory on NBCU properties. I'm adding the demo video here if you want to see how it works: