What is Agentic Advertising?

Agentic advertising introduces AI-driven agents into the ad ecosystem.

These agents are capable of making real-time decisions on behalf of advertisers, agencies, DSPs, SSPs, or publishers based on highly complex inputs and data computation. AI agents can optimize bidding, negotiate deals, and enforce media quality criteria, solving for signal loss and media quality while driving better marketing outcomes.

How does agentic advertising drive better outcomes and improve media effectiveness?

Agentic advertising introduces an AI-driven infrastructure that enables advertisers to make more intelligent decisions. Agents give marketers full control over what they buy, and allow them to tailor media to the intended outcome of a campaign. As a result, they improve media effectiveness and marketing outcomes.

Agents can factor in performance metrics, brand safety, viewability, and sustainability goals (e.g., carbon emissions), and actively negotiate for inventory that meets these standards. Plus, they learn in real time, ensuring continuous alignment with evolving quality criteria.

One key benefit of this intelligent decision-making is that it solves for signal loss—an issue that has long distorted media quality.

Media quality is an umbrella term that evaluates inventory based on a number of signals, including sustainability, viewability, and MFA, as well as more pernicious media like fraud and illegal content. Buyers want to know that they’re purchasing high-quality media, but in the complex advertising ecosystem, publishers’ signals can get distorted through the myriad of supply chain hops between the sell and buy sides. AI agents can be deployed right at the start of a media transaction (as close as possible to the publisher), allowing for decision making that uses near-perfect data and signal from the source.

Beyond media quality, these agents can integrate additional intelligence—such as audience insights, contextual relevance, or performance predictions—further enhancing a marketer’s ability to assess and select the right media for their goals. When buyers use AI agents to avoid low-quality media, they will only purchase the inventory they want and need, and will know exactly what they are purchasing.

How do agents plug into existing ad tech infrastructure?

Existing ad tech infrastructure will be able to leverage agents to wholly redesign workflows. AI agents will navigate the nuanced and complex decisioning with intelligence and efficiency for every player in the ad ecosystem:

• Buy-side: agents can act as intelligent bid managers, adjusting strategies and bids based on evolving goals, sustainability benchmarks (like Scope3’s emissions data), or any other layer a media buyer wishes to include.
• Sell-side: agents can represent media owners, setting dynamic floor prices, negotiating directly with buyer agents, and optimizing for both revenue and sustainability objectives.
• Measurement and verification: agents can ingest real-time data from campaign management platforms, adapting decisions to ensure campaigns align with goals.

We also anticipate new enterprises that will push the agentic advertising era forward:

• Third-party agent providers: these companies will provide brands with expert agents — which we call simply call ‘experts’ at Scope3 — focused on special jobs to be done (such as agents with special skillsets in governance, audience, etc.).
• Agentic destinations or distribution partners: these technology partners or media owners will support agentic advertising from wherever they sit in the ecosystem.

To unlock the full potential of agents across the ecosystem, they need a centralized environment where they can be built, trained, and deployed in coordination. That’s where the Agentic Media Platform comes in.

What is an agentic media platform, and how does it work? Who creates advertising agents?

An agentic media platform supports the creation, management, and deployment of agents tasked with making a universal decision about whether or not to buy an ad. Advertisers, DSPs, SSPs, publishers can use expert agents to drive specific goals. These agents operate within a shared ecosystem, using real-time data to optimize performance and sustainability.

Here’s how Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform works:

On the platform, a brand designs a bespoke media agent or a Brand Standards agent using a Scope3 or third-party agent blueprint.

1. A brand can then deploy these agents to their execution partners to make sure their agents will be running wherever they buy media.
2. A brand’s execution partners (agencies; trading desks) can also create and add custom agents to the brand strategy to support curation, optimization and other agent types.
3. The Scope3 Agentic Media Platform brings together the brand's world of agents to be deployed as a unified execution strategy, either in the programmatic ecosystem and/or via direct buys with our agentic partners.

Follow along on our blog as we continue to share more about agentic advertising, including how and why it will transform digital advertising for the better. Ready to employ your own agent on your next campaign?