In 2020, DCN reported on a study that put a number on what many publishers had long suspected. ISBA and PwC traced programmatic spend from advertiser to publisher and found that publishers received just 51% of it. Despite a push for transparency from both sides, the structure hasn’t improved much over time. An open-market buy still passes from agency to DSP to exchange to SSP, with data, identity, and verification vendors along the way. Every hop is an additional cost, taken from the publisher’s share.

Now, the industry is building its first new way to transact since programmatic. Agent-to-agent buying could shorten the distance between buyer and publisher, or it could add a new toll at every step. Which one we get depends on the terms being set right now, while the market is still small enough to shape.

In agentic advertising, we can return to a simpler standard: a seller, a buyer, and a direct connection between them.

How we got here

Programmatic solved many problems in media buying. SSPs let publishers sell supply at scale, and DSPs gave buyers one place to manage spend. Every layer that followed, for data, identity, verification, and measurement, fixed something else.

Individually, these solutions added value. Stacked together, those solutions became a toll road, with every vendor between buyer and seller taking its share.

Direct deals at programmatic speed

Direct deals have always depended on conversations: buyers explaining what their campaign needs, and publishers explaining what their audience and content can deliver. This approach leads to strong campaigns, but it’s also why direct deals take so long to finalize.

For most campaigns, a week or more of emails, RFP responses, and manual planning isn’t worth the effort, so the budget goes to the open exchange instead.

Agentic buying cuts the back-and-forth down to minutes while keeping the buyer and seller in direct contact. Here’s how an agentic direct deal works:

1. Share the brief. The buyer’s agent sends a campaign brief to a publisher’s seller agent, outlining the buyer’s objectives and requirements.
2. Discover relevant ad products. The seller agent matches the brief to the publisher’s ad products—combining inventory, data, and pricing—and returns one or more options for purchase.
3. Select the buy. The buyer chooses which ad products to purchase (a human-in-the-loop activity today), and the buyer’s agent communicates that selection to the seller agent.
4. Review and approve. The proposed order goes to the publisher’s team for human review. The team evaluates the terms and approves the buy if they are acceptable.
5. Book the order. Once approved, the seller agent books the order into the publisher’s own ad server.

What comes out is a direct IO that moves at programmatic speed, with fewer intermediaries.

Or the same tolls at machine speed

None of that is guaranteed. Nearly every intermediary in the programmatic chain is building an agent of its own. If each one sits between buyer and seller, the deal picks up more fees, collected even faster than before.

The new tolls just look a little different:

• A take rate on what the publisher is paid
• A charge for every brief answered or task completed
• Activation fees to put audiences or inventory in front of buyer agents
• Clearing fees deducted from the publisher’s payout

Together, they rebuild the same stack of fees inside a new interface.

The first platforms to scale will set the defaults for how agentic deals are executed and priced. Publishers have seen this before: programmatic’s fee structure was standard long before they had the leverage to question it.

What fair agentic economics should look like

Standards bodies like AgenticAdvertising.org and IAB Tech Lab are working out how agents should talk to each other. How the money moves is up to the market. Publishers can help set those terms by holding platforms to principles such as:

The deal stays direct. Any platform that places itself between them should be able to say exactly what it adds to the equation and justify what it charges.

Platforms charge for software, not a share of the deal. A marketplace that takes a percentage of every transaction earns more as deals get bigger, whether or not it does more work. Pricing the platform as a service keeps the deal value with the people who create it.

The agent answers to the publisher. An agent paid on spend or take rate works for its operator. A publisher’s agent should carry the publisher’s prices and rules, and nothing should go live until a person approves it. When we surveyed 105 attendees at Optable Connect, two-thirds said they want agents to negotiate and prepare orders, with people approving the final buy.

The buy-side won’t wait

Publishers aren’t the only ones who want better, more direct deals. Independent agencies like Goodway Group are prioritizing direct publisher connections and trimming SSPs as part of supply-path optimization. Some buyers are already deploying buyer agents to transact on their behalf.

What that means is that buyers aren’t waiting for publishers to see the money first. Publishers who build now will help shape how agentic deals get done.

A direct model protects what this business has always run on: relationships. When buyer agents and seller agents talk, buyers and sellers are talking, too.

The next era of advertising

The value of agentic advertising comes from removing the distance between buyer and publisher. That’s why we launched the Optable Agentic Marketplace in October, with a 0% take on direct deals between buyers and Optable seller customers, that provides buyers a single connection point to connect to multiple seller agents.

For publishers, the first step is small. Pick one high-value package, price it, and put it in front of a buyer agent. Then look closely at how much of the buyer’s spend reaches your ad server compared to an equivalent buy through another channel. 

The new standard should be the one the industry started with: direct connections between buyers and sellers, now possible at scale through their agents, with fewer intermediaries and better data between them.

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About the Author

Andy Sharkey is VP of Product at Optable, the agentic advertising platform that helps publishers, platforms, and advertisers build, manage, and activate audiences, and transact directly through buyer and seller agents. He has spent his career building products for the sell side, with previous product roles at Permutive, CafeMedia (now Raptive), PubMatic, and FreeWheel.