This week’s Media Briefing appears at how publishers are laying the rails for agent-led shopping for. We glance past the hype on the actuality of what brokers are in play at this time inside publishers’ industrial operations and what’s shifting into the pilot part.
Brokers aren’t a demo anymore; publishers have them working actual jobs.
Right this moment it’s RFP interpretation, planning, pacing, and curation. Subsequent up: direct pipes, fewer hops, and a smaller take-rate.
The promise is engaging: agentic AI-driven media buying and selling might (theoretically) wipe out lots of the issues brought on by its programmatic predecessor. Particularly, advert tech middlemen. As a substitute of getting advertisements go by way of numerous distributors who every take a reduce, brokers would successfully reduce the road, so extra of the cash reaches the writer, and the outcomes are simpler to see. If you happen to strip it again totally, it’s like middlemen constructed the pipes; brokers let publishers maintain the water.
The tip purpose for a writer can be: a vendor and a purchaser agent coordinating instantly, with ideally, no coordination agent within the center, as one exec at a serious international writer, who agreed to talk candidly in alternate for anonymity, put it. Their desire is to see if holding teams or media businesses are prepared to work with them instantly on agent pilots, the place their very own vendor agent talks on to the buy-side agent. What they don’t need: the recreation of a multi-step programmatic advert tech stack, whereby the assorted cuts taken by distributors alongside the best way can run as excessive as 50 p.c.
On that time, publishers agree. As Rob Bradley, svp of digital income, technique and operations at CNN Worldwide Industrial, mentioned: “Programmatic is de facto due for an improve.” Agentic-driven media shopping for may very well be it.
“We should always all be striving to make use of regardless of the newest know-how there may be to make our world extra environment friendly. And the concept that an agentic system would monitor efficiency of campaigns, CTR, viewability, conversions routinely, and modify pricing — the place issues are delivered to fulfill marketing campaign metrics based mostly off a command, is de facto interesting,” mentioned Bradley.
Whereas main publishers desire to think about constructing brokers in-house, smaller ones are for now utilizing these equipped by their tech companions, for targeted duties like RFP interpretation and response, viewers and marketing campaign planning, and optimization. It’s value underscoring that there isn’t any transactional quantity but in opposition to AI shopping for brokers, however extra publishers are quietly placing the stepping stones in place to arrange for what many see not simply as a risk however an inevitability.
On the face of it — compelling. However after all, the satan is within the particulars — they usually’re messy.
What’s actual vs hype?
Earlier than we get too carried away, it’s nonetheless early days. As two publishing execs, who agreed to talk anonymously, mentioned, the advert tech firms will probably be roughly six months forward of actuality. Relating to testing how purchaser and vendor brokers handle stock buying and selling, that can possible be within the proof-of-concept part for round that point, too.
And but, issues transfer quick within the generative AI period. Presently, round 50 p.c of Permutive’s 150+ writer shoppers are utilizing brokers of their day-to-day operations like RFP interpretations and assessing RFP win charges, in accordance with CEO Joe Root. Right this moment, the corporate will take the wrapper off a set of brokers at its Knowledge Collaboration Summit in New York, designed to make direct shopping for doable at scale, by what it claims will mitigate fragmentation on the open web. Its brokers are already dwell and working throughout the direct shopping for cycle from viewers administration, planning, optimization and reporting.
Shopping for brokers can adapt to every writer’s codecs and stock, utilizing supply-side alerts to make advertisements actually native, Root instructed Digiday. That ranges the enjoying discipline with Meta and Google — and fixes the resourcing hole the place businesses employees big-platform groups however can’t handle dozens of particular person publishers, he famous.
Brokers already contact lots of of hundreds of thousands in spend throughout the advert cycle; inside months, he expects these {dollars} to transact instantly by way of them. “Publishers are on the place the place there aren’t all that many steps required for them to have the ability to expose these to purchasing brokers,” he mentioned. A few of its writer companions at the moment are constructing brokers to orchestrate their Permutive brokers, he added.
Speak of brokers outworking people makes individuals squirm, however programmatic buying and selling continues to be painfully handbook — therefore the push for agent-led shopping for — and Bradley’s view is that the repair is modernization and redeployment, not cuts, shifting roles into extra strategic, revenue-driving work.
Final week’s buzz was Advert Context Protocol — an open-source customary that provides AI brokers a typical language to transact throughout advertisers, publishers, and advert tech. Most publishers Digiday spoke with are nonetheless sizing up the implications and watching whether or not the purchase facet adopts it.
“It stays to be seen whether or not platforms that deploy brokers which might be based mostly on AdCP’s requirements will change incumbent DSPs, or whether or not brokers constructed on these requirements grow to be built-in into present platforms as a characteristic,” mentioned a programmatic exec at a serious European writer.
Right here come the caveats
Because the current AWS outage confirmed, programs fail. The identical will probably be true of agentic media shopping for and promoting. It is not going to work properly proper out of the gate. As one publishing exec put it, the primary vendor brokers are like interns: keen, helpful, however needing supervision. Nobody arms gross sales to an intern for a cause: they underprice, seize the fast win, and skip guardrails. Early shopping for brokers will behave the identical method: rookie patrons searching low-cost attain, they confused.
“All the things that any junior income gross sales particular person in the complete media ecosystem has ever accomplished fallacious goes to occur at scale with brokers. You might want to stroll into this together with your eyes open, understanding it’s going to fail,” they mentioned.
One more reason to chop intermediaries: fewer hops imply sooner fixes when issues break. Even as soon as early bugs are sorted, greater questions stay, like can at this time’s advert servers (specifically Google Advert Supervisor) deal with agentic transactions with out slowing pages? For now, there’s no clear reply.
And why one-to-one partnerships from the purchase and promote facet will matter. “If we’ve a number of hops, it’s all going to go horribly fallacious, as a result of making an attempt to coordinate throughout a number of firms is difficult, in addition to a number of firms utilizing black field brokers — it’s going to be a large number,” mentioned the identical exec.
One other large caveat. No matter AdCP agent adoption will solely occur at scale if the outcomes drive strong outcomes for patrons and drive up yields for publishers, confused Root.
“I consider on this way forward for direct shopping for brokers, however transactional quantity is just not there at this time, and it gained’t transfer there except our [publisher ad] merchandise outperform Fb and Google. That’s the place publishers must focus – on constructing high-quality advert merchandise that ship outcomes. Then, direct shopping for brokers will begin to shift {dollars} there. Till we’ve acquired that nailed, it doesn’t actually matter if we’ve acquired a Protocol.”
BBC provides documentaries to U.S. subscription
BBC added ad-free documentaries to its U.S. subscription plan final week, as an enlargement to its paid program, which the corporate launched in June.
Subscribers can now entry over 1,600 hours of documentaries. New titles will probably be added weekly. A BBC subscription prices $49.99 a yr or $8.99 a month. Non-paying readers can watch trailers of the documentaries with advertisements. All of the documentaries can be found in a brand new part on the BBC US web site.
Over the previous 12 months, BBC.com has averaged 60 million month-to-month U.S. guests, with September bringing in 77 million U.S. guests, in accordance with the writer.
Since relaunching BBC.com final yr, the purpose was to construct a “entrance door” for BBC’s vary of content material, Tara Maitra, president of world information & streaming at BBC Studios, instructed Digiday.
“This can be a large step in our subscription journey,” Maitra mentioned. “It’s a part of a broader push to provide individuals extra methods to interact with BBC content material outdoors the U.Ok. — whereas additionally serving to us develop income that helps our journalism… Documentaries particularly are seeing a surge in curiosity, so that is actually a considerate transfer based mostly on strengths and viewers habits.”
Maitra confused that the subscription push isn’t pushed by the volatility within the advert market presently. “Promoting stays a giant a part of our enterprise, particularly globally, however subscriptions give us one other method to develop and steadiness how we herald income,” she mentioned.
The shifting search-and-discovery panorama — reshaped by AI instruments and assistant-led looking — has been on the BBC’s radar because it maps a U.S. subscription push. Up to now, it hasn’t seen any referral visitors drops, Maitra mentioned. In reality, September was its largest month ever for U.S. visitors. “No matter how discovery evolves, our strategic precedence stays unchanged – constructing direct, loyal, and engaged relationships with audiences on our owned and operated platforms. That’s why we’ve launched a subscription mannequin,” she mentioned. – Sara Guaglione
Numbers to know
- $48 million: The online loss posted by the Los Angeles Instances for 2024, regardless of producing $237 million in income.
- $15 billion: The sum Trump seeks in a refiled defamation go well with in opposition to The New York Instances.
- £52.8 million ($71 million): Generated in show advert income by U.Ok. publishers within the second quarter of 2025 — down 7 p.c, in accordance with knowledge from the Affiliation of On-line Publishers and Deloitte.
- 72%: Quantity of Gemini solutions that confirmed critical sourcing errors, in an AI Assistants’ Accuracy Research.
What we’ve lined
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas browser goals to show the web right into a dialog
- OpenAI simply threw one other curveball: a browser referred to as ChatGPT Atlas
- For publishers, ChatGPT Atlas might really feel like deja vu with larger stakes. If ChatGPT turns into the entrance door to the web, it dangers chopping content material creators additional out of the loop.
Learn extra about what it actually means in apply right here.
AI royalties for small and midsize publishers: collective licensing’s subsequent large play
- Don’t credit score OpenAI’s ChatGPT, credit score company LLMs — enterprise RAG is what’s creating royalty income for publishers.
- Dow Jones’ Factiva has a utilization API to make sure that any utilization is attributable and that it might guarantee its publishers are paid precisely (on a per utilization foundation per RAG question).
Learn extra about how they’re doing this right here.
The Economist licenses its content material to enterprise shoppers’ personal LLMs
- The Economist has opened its API to company shoppers with their very own knowledge ring-fenced LLMs this August. Its president, Luke Bradley Jones sees this as a possible path to recurring, usage-based income that monetizes evergreen content material within the zero-click period.
- The Monetary Instances has additionally opened its archive to enterprise shoppers’ personal LLMs.
Learn extra about this right here.
In Graphic Element: How AI search is altering writer visibility
- Some publishers are seeing respectable visibility in AI platforms, significantly ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode.
- AI is extra prone to pull data from user-generated content material from sources like Reddit and YouTube, than from conventional publishers, the examine claims.
Learn extra concerning the tendencies right here.
What we’re studying
New York Instances debuts TikTok-style Watch tab in its app
The New York Instances mentioned it’s including a brand new hub inside its foremost app that includes a curated feed of quick, vertical, scrollable information movies refreshed every day. The transfer is a part of a broader push to accommodate all of its journalism in a single place quite than in separate apps.
The Atlantic is prospering below hybrid mannequin
Amid trade turmoil, the 168-year-old Atlantic is prospering with its newspaper-magazine hybrid mannequin.
Italian publishers demand investigation into Google AI Overviews
Italian publishers have requested regulators to research Google’s AI Overviews, warning the characteristic’s summaries drain visitors and threaten their companies. The trade physique FIEG confirmed it has filed a proper criticism with Agcom, Italy’s communications authority.”
Layoffs at The Wall Avenue Journal
The Wall Avenue Journal has reduce a few dozen reporters and editors from its well being, science and training groups, editor-in-chief Emma Tucker instructed employees in a memo.
AI-generated information websites are spouting larger quantity of viral slop
A brand new wave of content material farms is utilizing AI to churn out clickbait.
