Agentic AI: Building a better advertising ecosystem

Agentic advertising is transformative for brands. By powering more efficient campaigns, fostering deeper cultural resonance, and generating lasting ROI, brand agents deliver clear wins for advertisers.

But the impact doesn’t stop there.

When agents direct spend toward quality media, align brand messaging with cultural nuance, and free advertising professionals to focus on strategy, the benefits ripple across the entire ecosystem. The result: advertising that is intelligent, more transparent, and more sustainable.

Read on to see how agentic advertising rewards quality, reduces waste, and creates better experiences for everyone involved.

In this blog:

1. Why the ecosystem needs a reset
2. How agents clean up waste and restore value
3. How agents align brand values and narratives with media richness
4. How agents enhance the human ad operations experience
5. The ecosystem-wide business case

Why the ecosystem needs a reset

Digital advertising has long been plagued by inefficiency and misalignment. Too much budget disappears into fraud, bot traffic, or low-quality placements. Publishers producing trusted journalism and premium content often lose out to cheaper, less meaningful inventory due to clunky brand safety solutions. Meanwhile, brands struggle with tools that reduce nuanced, crafted strategies into rigid categories and keyword blocks.

Agentic AI offers a way to reset, restoring value to high-quality media and reconnecting brands with the environments that reflect them best — making the industry and our ecosystem better as a result.

How agents clean up waste and restore value

At the heart of agentic AI is discernment. Agents analyze every impression and filter out what doesn’t deliver value, whether that’s fraudulent traffic, low-quality content, or placements misaligned with brand values and narratives.

This clean-up work matters at scale. By removing waste, agents redirect spend to the publishers producing journalism, storytelling, and cultural content that audiences trust. The outcome is a healthier marketplace where dollars flow more directly from advertisers to meaningful, aligned, and high-quality media.

That transparency also carries an environmental dividend. When wasted impressions and excessive processing are cut out of the supply chain, emissions for ad delivery fall too. Efficiency, performance, and sustainability are all linked — and they’re all boosted with agentic advertising.

How agents align brand values and narratives with media richness

Brands are not one-dimensional. They’re built through years of creative strategy, cultural resonance, and consumer connection. Media is just as rich, shaped by journalists, editors, artists, and creators. Yet in today’s system, both are often flattened into categories that strip away this vibrancy.

Agents change that. With a more sophisticated understanding of context, they can connect brands with the media environments that genuinely reflect their values. For example, instead of avoiding “all news about climate disasters,” an energy provider’s brand agent can distinguish between fear-mongering clickbait about dormant supervolcanoes, and a thoughtful piece on the ability of Bay Area infrastructure to withstand earthquakes.

This precision creates brand-media alignment that respects the creative equity poured in by both sides. Brands retain the intent and crux of their meticulously-crafted identity, and publishers are rewarded for the quality, valuable media they create.

How agents enhance the human ad operations experience

Another ecosystem benefit is how agents reshape the work of ad professionals. Too often, skilled people spend their time managing manual controls: maintaining keyword lists, setting filters, adjusting targeting criteria. It’s tedious and — at times — fatiguing, and it distracts from the higher-value work of strategy, creativity, and connection.

Agents take on those repetitive tasks. They enforce brand standards, analyze inventory quality, and make targeting decisions. And because they’re designed to be transparent and tunable, brands can choose the right balance of autonomy and human-in-the-loop oversight.

This flexibility frees ad ops professionals, traders, and strategists to focus on what humans do best: interpreting culture, building meaningful brand narratives, and strengthening partnerships.

The ecosystem-wide business case

When agents operate at scale, the benefits are felt across the ecosystem:

• Publishers expand revenue opportunities as spend flows back into quality journalism and high-quality content.
• Advertisers run more efficient, narrative-driven campaigns that deliver growth and reduce risk.
• Agencies empower teams to move beyond manual operations and into strategic execution.
• Consumers experience advertising that feels more relevant, less intrusive, and tied to media they trust.

What emerges is an ecosystem that’s commercially, creatively, and environmentally sustainable.

By cutting waste, aligning brands with quality media, and amplifying human expertise, agents strengthen the connection between advertiser intention and publisher creativity. That connection restores balance by funding meaningful content, creating better ad experiences, and driving growth in a way that benefits the entire system.

The business case for agentic AI is clear: when the media ecosystem thrives, everyone wins.