Agentic advertising has become one of the most talked-about topics in adtech – AI agents buying and selling media on behalf of advertisers and publishers, promising a more automated, efficient ecosystem. But beyond the headlines, where are we actually today?

That was the starting point for Episode 2 of the Revving PubCast, where our Founder Andrew Mole sat down with Revving co-founders Christopher Pettit and David Mandeno for a wide-ranging conversation on where the market is really heading – what agentic advertising means in practice, where adoption stands today, and why the shift extends far beyond media buying alone.

Separating the real from the hype

Agentic advertising is a major talking point, but Andrew was clear that adoption is still early. The technology is real – the industry is now doing the work of testing, learning, and proving where AI agents create genuine value. The opportunity isn’t replacing people; it’s letting software agents handle the operational complexity humans can’t optimise at scale.

“It solves the human capital problem. Humans are limited by scale… Agentic gives us the opportunity to get the best job done, not just get the job done.” – Andrew Mole, CEO, pubX

Putting publishers back at the centre

Programmatic created extraordinary scale, but that scale hasn’t always translated into better outcomes for the publishers producing the inventory advertisers want to reach. Andrew argued that agentic advertising is a chance to rebalance that relationship – helping publishers surface the right audiences, package value more precisely, and transact more efficiently, with far greater control over how their inventory is valued and sold.

The winners, as the conversation made clear, won’t simply be the platforms with the most automation – they’ll be the businesses that create the most value for the ecosystem.

Payments can’t stay outside the workflow

A theme from Revving’s side of the table: as media buying becomes more autonomous, the payment infrastructure underneath it still runs on settlement cycles designed for a very different era.

“Payment terms should be a choice that either participant of the transaction can choose into, rather than that being dictated.” – David Mandeno, COO, Revving

If campaigns are going to be transacted by agents in real time, the financial plumbing has to evolve alongside them.

The pubX view

Agentic advertising isn’t another optimisation layer – it’s a value-chain shift in how media is transacted and how value is created. That’s exactly what pubX has spent five years building, and now operates in market. Our agentic platform is earned from the publisher’s side up, not built top-down: dynamic price flooring established publisher trust, Bid Intelligence built the data and cross-SSP infrastructure, and the agentic marketplace now connects publishers and advertisers through AI agents that negotiate on both sides of the transaction in real time – so curation and deal execution scale without publishers losing control.

The shift is already underway – and pubX is already in market. The question for publishers is whether they help shape the rules the agents operate by, or inherit them.

🎥 Watch the full episode of the Revving PubCast: https://youtu.be/–TvYUkiamM?si=PnbjF2guy55Lox8C

Read more on Revving’s site: https://revving.io/agentic-advertising-publishers-platforms-payments/