WPP Media has announced that it is developing a Buyer Agent for Video as part of an Agentic Standards Initiative that involves “premium media owners, platforms, and standards bodies.” The goal? “To define how TV and video buyer and seller agents interact safely, transparently, and at scale.”
What is driving the debut of this buyer agent? WPP explains, “The media industry is on the verge of its biggest evolution since the introduction of programmatic: agentic media. If programmatic changed the way media was bought, agentic AI has the potential to change the way media decisions are made — from planning and activation to optimization, measurement, and reconciliation.
“Across the advertising ecosystem, companies are announcing agents designed to automate parts of buying and selling. But trusted agentic media cannot be built by one side of the market alone. For agentic buying and selling to work at scale, both sides of the marketplace need common standards for how buyer and seller agents communicate, validate, and execute approved decisions.”
This explains the Agentic Standards Initiative for Video Buying, which will see WPP Media co-develop shared technical, workflow, and governance standards for TV and video buyer-seller agent communication within WPP Open, its agentic marketing platform.
The Buyer Agent will operate as part of its Agentic Activation Orchestration Layer, the infrastructure inside WPP Open that coordinates how our people, agents, data, tools, approval controls, and partner systems interact.
The initial focus is linear TV, connected TV, and premium video — “areas where high-value investment and complex transaction workflows make trust, governance, and interoperability essential. Over time, our learnings from this work will inform our approach across other channels. ”
For WPP Media, “Our goal is to move the market beyond isolated agent announcements and toward a common foundation for trusted agent-to-agent media buying. ”
WPP Media continues, “We see TV and video as areas where agentic buying can most meaningfully improve speed, intelligence, and responsiveness. They are also areas where the governance models required to scale agentic exchange safely are still emerging. Without common standards, our industry risks creating a new fragmentation layer: bespoke integrations between every buyer and seller, inconsistent agent-to-agent interpretation, exposure of client strategy, opaque decisioning, and insufficient controls around live campaign activation.
The opportunity is not simply to automate TV and video buying, but to create trusted infrastructure and standards for better media decision-making — infrastructure that can also inform agentic interaction in other channels as capabilities mature.”
WPP says it is working with such partners as Comcast Advertising and its global adtech platform FreeWheel, Disney Advertising, Fox Advertising, NBCUniversal, Netflix, and Paramount as well as standards bodies IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org to define how the WPP Buyer Agent and media owner Seller Agents communicate, validate, support approved media transaction workflows, and escalate decisions.
“Through the Agentic Standards Initiative, we aim to create and share common technical, workflow, and governance standards that can support agentic interaction responsibly and at scale for the broader industry,” it says. “Our shared aim is to avoid a future where every media owner, platform, and agency builds a different agentic integration — and instead help the industry capture the growth opportunities AI can create in a trusted and interoperable way. ”
WPP Media CEO Brian Lesser adds, “Two decades ago, the move to programmatic marked a fundamental change in how media was bought and sold. We expect agentic media to have an even bigger impact on our industry in the months and years ahead. The companies that lead this next era will be the ones that combine intelligence, interoperability, and governance to define how media decisions are made. That’s what we are building with our partners: a trusted buyer-agent strategy designed to operate in our clients’ interests, maximize the value of their media investments, deepen consumer relationships, and translate intelligence into growth.”
