The promise of agentic media buying is growing closer to reality through a new partnership between AI-powered ad tech companies Olyzon and Swivel, with connected TV (CTV) as a fertile testing ground.
“In advertising, it’s still early days on how we can make the most of [agentic buying],” said Jules Minvielle, Olyzon’s co-founder and CEO. “One way is to see it as a replacement of human work, the managed IO [insertion order], and the direct conversation back-and-forth. The second is as an opportunity to challenge the programmatic ecosystem that’s still there.”
Two-thirds (66%) of US ad buyers plan to focus more on agentic ad buying this year, per an IAB survey taken between November 2025 and January 2026. Here's what marketers need to know.
The partnership connects Swivel’s publisher-side seller agents with Olyzon’s buyer agents. On Olyzon’s side, buyer agents turn parameters set by the advertiser into creative briefs. This agent then communicates with Swivel’s seller-side agents to find relevant ad opportunities for the advertiser.
Swivel (formerly PilotDesk) draws on metadata shared by publishers about their ad inventory. When Olyzon’s agent submits a buyer’s brief, Swivel’s agent evaluates it against publishers’ available ad products and associated guardrails set by the operators. Swivel’s sell-side agent responds to the buyer agent’s request with one or more matching ad packages.
Both companies’ agents use Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), a protocol developed for LLM-based agents in digital advertising that allows them to speed up campaign planning and execution.
Humans are kept in the loop. On the publisher’s side, a human reviews and approves the ad deal negotiated by the agents before the ads are scheduled. On the buyer side, a human approves the creative, although agents validate the ad specifications in the campaign.
“One of the things we encourage our sellers to do is to add metadata to audiences so that natural language has a higher probability of choosing the correct audience,” said Swivel’s CEO and cofounder Joseph Hirsch.
French pharmaceutical company Pierre Fabre Group is an early adopter of the agent-to-agent partnership, testing ads on CTV for the Eau Thermale Avène skincare line in front of US viewers.
“By testing this new agentic approach with Olyzon, we can capitalize on a very dynamic media landscape,” said Tom El Bez, global chief digital officer at Pierre Fabre Group. “We see CTV as a very qualitative and measurable channel to drive real business impact for Avène there.”
Programmatic advertising costs a lot to advertisers over and above the revenue that goes to publishers.
Agentic media buying is set up to bypass this programmatic workflow, cutting out much of the “ad tech tax.” The Swivel-Olyzon workflow allows advertisers to compare publishers’ offers while publishers can optimize revenue from their inventory, all without having to worry about the labor it would take to carry out these calculations manually.
“In an agentic buy, the agent doesn’t care if it’s managing a hundred line items and a hundred creatives because there’s no human behind it, even if it breaks everything up into this huge matrix of spend, times, creative,” said Hirsch.
With agents, “the prompting is in place to protect the buyer so that you can get enough information about the buy to inform both these parties, buyer and seller agent, to have correct targeting, inventory, audience, geography, and correct budgeting,” he said. “These are all the things that improve the probability that the money the person is spending will produce their goal.”
“Historically, we've been focusing a lot on social media for our European audiences, but the US market is a huge opportunity for scale,” El Bez said. “By using CTV, we want to target net new, high-intent audiences in premium and brand-safe environments, to be sure we reach them where they are the most engaged.”
Automating media buying with agents helps make more obscure ad formats available to more buyers by avoiding time-intensive discussions between advertisers and sellers. CTV inventory, especially through manufacturers (OEMs), becomes easier to access through time-saving agent-to-agent workflows. These automated workflows allow advertisers access to formats like pause ads and interactive ads, because the agents can evaluate these opportunities at scale with humans, if publishers share the metadata about them.
“During this test, we are seeing how the campaign briefs can go directly between the systems,” said El Bez. “The agents do the heavy lifting, like approvals, trafficking, and campaign management, while staying strictly inside the parameters we define.”
With agents managing more of the digital media work, the marketing team is freed up to tackle more high-level strategic tasks, El Bez said.
This was originally featured in the EMARKETER Daily newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.
You've read 0 of 2 free articles this month.
685 Third Avenue21st FloorNew York, NY 100171-800-405-0844
1-800-405-0844[email protected]