Agentic advertising was the buzzword of the year at Cannes this year. It stands to reason this hype is ahead of reality.

Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc, gives a reality check of where the hurdles to agentic advertising, which holds the promise -- yet again -- of establishing direct paths between advertisers and publishers.

“Is this just AI jazz hands, or is there something actually there under the hood?’ Discovery and planning agents, packaging agents — those are pretty low risk, and they’re definitely possible. They make the planning process faster, while humans still set up the deals and line items. The highest-risk piece is negotiation. These models are hard-coded to be nice, and the worst thing you want to do is put a nice AI negotiator against a human on the other side. They’ll give that stuff to you for free. Humans should negotiate, but AI systems can do the heavy lifting, and we’ll crawl, walk and run into it.” 

Chapters:

• 00:09 EX.CO Spot

• 00:37 Intro

• 01:37 Welcome

• 01:57 Agentic Advertising Hype

• 05:56 Publishers and Ad Tech Tax

• 07:40 Agents and the Content Bargain

• 11:13 New Monetization Models

• 13:38 Best Cannes Memories