• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

PMG, a global independent ad agency, became one of the first partners to pilot a new artificial intelligence (AI) agent infrastructure launched Wednesday from FreeWheel, a Comcast company.

It runs FreeWheel’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and an intelligence suite of tools connected to PMG’s marketing operating system called "Alli."

The companies announced the partnership and technology on Wednesday.

The MCP server forms a handshake that allows disparate AI agents, such as a buyer's agent and a seller's agent, to communicate and transact without custom, manual integrations for every platform. 

The system is embedded in premium video transactions to enable buyers and sellers to automate workflows, and optimize performance in real time. It monitors deal performance to analyze spend and inventory quality, track commitments, and automate routine decisions, smoothing challenges and traditional manual processes through FreeWheel's agent infrastructure running on the open-source MCP standard.

AI in the ad industry is often referred to as "a wrapper around generic models," rather than true interoperability, Mike Treon, Head of CTV & Video Strategy at PMG stated in the release.

But this partnership based on agent-to-agent technology goes beyond reporting to understand the streaming video ecosystem -- moving beyond manual setup to ways that teams can optimize performance for complex global deals.

There are a handful of emerging standards that will allow similar interactions and collaboration. For example, Anthropic, Amazon and FreeWheel back the MCP standard that provides data access and tools that call agents.

Yahoo, PubMatic, and Scope back the Ad Content Protocol (AdCP) standard for agent-to-platform communication.

Google developed Agent-2-Agent (A2A) for general negotiations and task coordination between agents, and IAB Tech Lab developed standards called the Agentic Realtime Framework (ARTF) for programmatic bidding.