• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, 4 hours ago

Our industry doesn’t lack for press releases about “agentic” advertising capabilities, particularly in this run-up week before the opening of the Cannes Lions Festival.

Many of these announcements are thin, typically just showing off a snazzy-looking MCP (model context protocol) that triggers an old-school digital programmatic call to a legacy demand-side or sell-side platform, all packaged as some amazing, revolutionary “agentic” advertising -- when it’s more like a new coat of paint on an old programmatic platform.

So it was nice to see Fox Advertising announce earlier this week end-to-end agentic advertising capabilities purpose-built for the TV ad world.

The company is transforming its Fox AdStudio into a secure, AI-powered system that embeds agents across audience planning, media transactions and activations for all its linear and streaming channels.

Several big names were among its agency and activation partners, including WPP, Horizon Media and Comcast’s Universal Ads.

More than just automation. Fox Advertising has built and deployed autonomous agents that can interact with secure counterparties across robust, multivariate tasks.

As Fox’s Stephano Kim said in the announcement: “While many are focused on automation, which is indeed important, we believed that ensuring an authentic and secure method of transacting agent to agent was a gap that needed to be addressed.”

End-to-end agentic planning and buying. Fox AdStudio now enables agentic audience discovery, audience sizing, forecasting and recommendations on an automated basis.

This means agencies can dramatically accelerate the back-and-forth process of media planners and sales planners exchanging briefs and proposals, thus reducing friction, accelerating access to information, and speeding up decision-making.

The platform streamlines agnostic digital buying for digital audiences on Comcast’s Universal Ads, which takes self-served streaming ad-buying to the next level by enabling agents to activate on their own within its governance-defined protocols.

Including linear negotiation and activation. Adding agentic capabilities to digital media DSPs and SSPs is hard, but taking them to the stodgy world of linear TV advertising is game-changing.

Fox’s platform now enables agent-to-agent negotiation and automated activation for linear TV ad spots and schedules, replacing the hundreds of phone calls, faxes, emails and spreadsheets typically required to buy and sell a linear TV ad schedule.

This means no more merry-go-round of the back-and-forth communications previously required to secure TV spots. It can now all happen in milliseconds through agentic negotiation and activation, instead of  days and weeks.

Automating tedious tactics, enabling more strategy. So much of planners’ and sellers’ jobs today are caught up in the minutiae of spots and dots, when everyone would like to focus more on audiences, intelligence, desired outcomes, yield and so much else.

Creating agents to do the tedious parts of that process enables buyers, sellers and clients to really dig in on what matters, and ensure that the spots they buy work best for advertisers, and that each and every spot is what’s best for publishers, too.

Just the beginning. What Fox is doing here matters. For all the talk of agentic advertising, we haven’t seen a major TV player truly open up all its inventory, both streaming and linear, to truly agentic transactions. It is hard to do.

Just managing the protocols, governance, and security are nightmares, and anticipating usage scenarios in a vacuum is hard.

Clients and agencies want holistic views across media properties and into each and every content and audience silo. Doing that by hand is hard. Doing it with agents is a win-win.

Does this mean there will be no more phone calls, faxes and handshakes in the TV ad world? Of course not, but hopefully they will be more about celebrating success than bottlenecking business.

What do you think?