Talking agentic TV ad transactions in Cannes, the relationship-driven epicenter of our industry

So many see the advertising industry’s fast-emerging AI-driven agentic future as anathema to its relationship driven core. It isn’t and won’t be, as I learned at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week.

I flew to France excited to talk about Simulmedia’s recently announced partnership with FOX Broadcasting and its industry-first end-to-end agentic platform for streaming and linear TV ad transactions. I was worried that the Cannes world of panels, presentations and impromptu gatherings would rue the day that automated AI agents would drive the selling and buying of the billions of dollars of TV ads that have always been done through highly personal phone calls, faxes and handshakes between and among longtime friends.

But I quickly realized that they are not mutually exclusive.

Spending time in Cannes connects all of us to our industry’s history. An advertising world driven by agentic transactions is not new. Agency-driven buying and selling of advertising has been a central part of the media marketplace for centuries, just as agent-driven media networks were, a business popularized by Swiss ad specialist Publicitas in the mid-1800s with its network of German and Swiss newspapers.

Those early agentic transactions and media networks relied on trusted human relationships, epitomized by the emergence of specialist independent ad buyers and sellers, leveraging the most modern technology of the times, trains, timetables, telegraphs, stereotyping and mechanized typography.

That’s correct. Technology-enabled agentic transactions in the advertising industry are not new. Nor is exploiting the best technology available mutually exclusive to the human relationship center of our historic TV ad industry. AI-driven agentic negotiation and activation of streaming and linear TV ad transactions can deliver a level of speed, efficiency, accuracy, yield management and security that is critical for both advertisers and media owners to maximize the value of each and every impression and, importantly, deliver the best experience possible to consumers.

Automated, agentic transactions give more strength and importance to the human relationship parts of the ad buying and selling. Buyers and sellers both need to exercise care in which agents to transact with, under what rules and with constant monitoring. That requires real partnership. It requires a predictability of conduct. And it requires trust. Given the precious and scarce nature of premium video inventory, TV media owners are not going to grant “agentic rights” lightly. Neither will buyers. We have all seen the fraud, pollution and devalued pricing that real-time bidding platforms and disinterested, brokering intermediaries brought to the world the banner ad, web video, and CTV advertising.

An enormous topic at Cannes this year was that quality matters, whether in media or data, that trust matters, with who you transact with and how your campaigns are measured, and that the ad industry needs to regain control of how it transacts business from those focused on harvesting media rather than creating and building it. That message was preached on every stage.

Creating and building the media world that publishers, advertisers, agencies and consumers deserve requires a high degree of human control, and that control and trust can only come through strong, personal human relationships. Yes. Agent transactions are the future of the TV ad world. But so are its human relationship-centered partnerships.