Among the many potential use cases for agentic AI in ad tech, there’s one widely seen as a good place to start: automating direct sales.
But automating direct sales requires detailed knowledge of a publisher’s ad availabilities, its current bookings and prices. All of this information is in the ad server. Which makes Google’s Buyer Direct the best poised product to solve this problem – and build a workable solution before any of its competitors.
On this week’s podcast, we bring on Gareth Glaser, an ad tech co-founder and sell-side veteran who served as a chair of Prebid and spent time at both Magnite and AppNexus.
He thinks Buyer Direct, which Google rolled out in a low-key fashion, should be grabbing everyone in the industry’s attention. “ The ad tech nerd in me [thinks] this is really cool and a great product,” Glaser says. The product has “no middlemen, no hops, there’s massively reduced latency. There’s tremendous transparency because the ad server really knows what’s going on.”
Though no numbers have been officially released, the publishers Glaser talked to indicated a fee in the 10% range, which could boost a buyer’s media performance simply by virtue of creating more working media.
Of course, the reason the product is so good is because Google is able to build it on top of its ad server, which commands an almost universal market share among large publishers. Remind y’all of anything?
Assuming AI agents automate direct sales – and leaving the question of whether Google dominates AI-mediated direct sales unanswered – Glaser expects that the greater ease with which buyers can do direct sales will put force programmatic to prove its worth.
“It will put a ton of pressure on programmatic to outperform direct-sold strategies with very low middleman margins,” Glaser says. “Programmatic needs to earn what it’s doing. And I think programmatic can.”
