WPP Media has revealed an Agentic Standards Initiative for Video Buying in collaboration with premium media owners, technology platforms, and industry standards bodies to co-develop shared standards for agentic video buying.
As part of the initiative, WPP Media is developing a Buyer Agent for Video within WPP Open , WPP’s agentic marketing platform. The initiative will initially focus on linear TV, connected TV and premium video, where high-value investment and complex transaction workflows make trust, governance and interoperability essential.
Participating partners include 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 .
WPP Media and participating partners will inform, test,and refine the technical, workflow and governance standards for how buyer and seller agents communicate, validate, support approved media transaction workflows, and escalate decisions.
Brands and advertisers will benefit from the initiative through:
The WPP Media Buyer Agent for Video will operate as part of an Agentic Activation Orchestration Layer within WPP Open, which coordinates how WPP Media’s human decision makers, agents, data, tools, approval controls and partner systems interact.
Media owners and platforms will continue to operate their own Seller Agents and orchestration layers, making common technical, workflow, and governance standards essential for agentic buying to scale.
“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,” said Brian Lesser , CEO, WPP Media.
Lesser added, “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.”
Across the advertising ecosystem, companies are announcing agents designed to automate parts of buying and selling. But for agentic buying and selling to work at scale, media buyers and sellers need common standards for how their agents communicate, validate, and execute approved decisions.
Without common standards, the industry risks significant increases in fragmentation and complexity, including 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.
“Against the backdrop of uncertainty that comes from the emergence of any new technology wave, it’s critical the industry focuses its efforts on architecting the right, scalable blueprint for an agentic future that delivers for marketers” said James Rooke, President, Comcast Advertising.
Rooke added, “WPP Media’s Agentic Standards Initiative is an important step towards creating this future and aligns well our long-held philosophy on supporting initiatives that prioritize transparency, trust and industry interoperability.”
“The future of media buying isn’t just automated – it’s intelligent, interoperable, and outcome-driven,” said Jamie Power, Senior Vice…