In the long term: advertisers are using more agentic tools

At the same time that ad buyers are skeptical of black boxes, more agencies are using agentic-based workflows and tools.

In the past year, Amazon-focused adtech firm Gigi has pivoted its business from helping brands buy streaming ads to managing agencies’ spend and operations with Amazon’s demand-side platform.

Adam Epstein, cofounder and CEO of Gigi, said that marketers are still looking for custom, bespoke agents that help agencies with individual ways of working, especially with Amazon’s trove of properties and data.

“We have the concept of a holistic view of the customer,” he said.

In other cases, agencies have their own agentic tools for managing Amazon.

Omnicom Media Group, for example, has its own tool, similar to Amazon’s, that recommends where clients should spend money within Amazon. Omnicom also owns data firm Acxiom, which can track ad impressions to sales, said Mike Feldman, global head of commerce at Omnicom Media Group.

“Every product we build is agentic-enabled with MCPs [Model Context Protocol servers],” Feldman said, referring to the open standard that lets AI agents connect to and operate software tools.