Key Points
- WPP Media is developing an AI-powered Buyer Agent for video advertising as part of a new Agentic Standards Initiative.
- The initiative aims to establish industry standards for how AI buyer and seller agents communicate and transact.
- WPP is working with major media companies including Comcast Advertising, Disney, Fox, NBC Universal, Netflix and Paramount.
WPP Media is developing an AI-powered Buyer Agent for television and video advertising as part of a broader effort to establish industry standards for agentic media buying.
The company announced the initiative this week, saying it is collaborating with major media companies, advertising technology providers and industry organizations to create a framework governing how AI-powered buyer and seller agents communicate, validate transactions and execute approved media purchases.
The project, known as the Agentic Standards Initiative for Video Buying, comes as artificial intelligence begins to play a larger role in media planning, activation, optimization and measurement.
WPP Media argues that agentic AI could have a greater impact on advertising than programmatic buying, which transformed digital media transactions over the past two decades.
“The media industry is on the verge of its biggest evolution since the introduction of programmatic: agentic media,” the company said in announcing the initiative.
The Buyer Agent will operate within WPP Open, the agency group’s AI-powered marketing platform. Specifically, it will function through an Agentic Activation Orchestration Layer that coordinates interactions among employees, AI agents, data systems, approval processes and partner platforms.
The initial focus will be on linear television, connected TV and premium video advertising, categories where large transaction values and complex workflows place a premium on governance, transparency and interoperability.
WPP said it is working with a broad group of industry participants, including Comcast Advertising and its FreeWheel ad technology platform, Disney Advertising, Fox Advertising, NBC Universal, Netflix and Paramount. Industry organizations IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org are also participating in the effort.
According to WPP, the goal is to avoid creating a fragmented marketplace in which every media buyer and seller develops proprietary AI integrations that cannot communicate effectively with one another.
Without common standards, the company warned, the industry risks creating inconsistent agent-to-agent communications, exposing sensitive client data, introducing opaque decision-making processes and reducing oversight of campaign execution.
Brian Lesser, the Chief Executive Officer of WPP Media, compared the emergence of agentic media to the industry’s shift toward programmatic advertising.
“Two decades ago, the move to programmatic marked a fundamental change in how media was bought and sold,” Lesser said. “We expect agentic media to have an even bigger impact on our industry in the months and years ahead.”
The initiative comes amid growing interest across the advertising industry in applying AI not only to campaign execution but also to strategic decision-making: While many companies have introduced AI agents that automate portions of the advertising workflow, WPP’s effort seeks to create a common framework that would allow those systems to operate across multiple buyers, sellers and platforms.
The company said lessons learned from the television and video effort could eventually be applied to other advertising channels as agentic technologies mature.
