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JUNE 24, 2026 |
This special edition of EMARKETER Daily
is made possible by Quantcast. Meet Q+, Quantcast’s autonomous advertising engine that optimizes campaigns across the open internet in real time, helping marketers improve performance while saving time and budget. |
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In this edition: |
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TOP STORY |
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Agentic ad buying has made strides through the first half of this year to fulfill its promise of saving marketers time and money when planning campaigns. |
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Though the technology still has plenty to prove, large agencies and publishers are forging shared standards to make those workflows reliable, meeting advertiser demand without sacrificing trust.
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CANNES GOES AGENTIC |
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Agentic ad buying has grown into a major topic during one of the marketing industry's flagship events. At this year's Cannes Lions, a number of sessions will highlight how automation is impacting the way in which they conduct campaigns. |
Two sessions illustrate the breadth of the conversation. A
Monday panel from Jellyfish and Brandtech, developed in partnership with INSEAD, examined whether LLMs respond to creative the same way human audiences do, framing it as a "two audience" problem marketers now have to solve simultaneously. A Wednesday session from Microsoft
will go further and position the emerging agentic web as an infrastructure shift most marketing leaders have not yet internalized, one that requires reallocating investment rather than simply layering AI onto existing workflows. |
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With so many eyes on the event, a number of vendors and companies celebrate Cannes by announcing their agentic innovations or bolstering their recent efforts in the space. |
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Nvidia announced a partnership with Higgsfield AI, an AI video and image production platform, and showcased agents capable of handling the full marketing automation lifecycle, from campaign ideation through creative production, posting, and optimization, inside a single interface. The platform runs on NVIDIA Blackwell architecture and the company claims campaigns for nearly 400 Fortune 500 companies are created on it. |
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TripleLift arrived with a pointed argument: the advertising industry has spent a decade optimizing delivery, and delivery is no longer enough. The company used Cannes to showcase TL Spark, its agentic intelligence layer designed to coordinate creative, supply, audience signals, and measurement into a single system rather than treating them as separate campaign variables. Alongside it, TL Direct gives buyers a self-serve platform for curated media activation that supports MCP-based access, positioning it as a bridge to agent-led buying. |
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Pinterest took a different angle, unveiling infrastructure designed to make the platform accessible to external AI agents rather than building a new ad format. Its MCP server connects partner tools directly to Pinterest campaign data, analytics, and keyword insights, including proprietary signals from its Taste Graph. Alpha partners include PMG, Pacvue, Dentsu, Havas, and Omnicom's Jump450. | | | |
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INDUSTRY VIEWS |
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Advertising platforms are becoming easier to use, yet performance gains remain elusive for many marketers. As AI evolves, attention is shifting from automation to the systems driving decision-making. This article was contributed by Quantcast. | | |
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ANALYSIS |
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AI and automation are transforming agency operations, forcing agencies to restructure their teams and rethink their value proposition in an AI-driven world. |
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"The things that technology has made easier were the things that were actually quite easy," said Liane Nadeau, chief investment officer at Digitas, speaking with our analyst Nate Elliott at EMARKETER’s Ad Buyer Strategies Summit. "What technology has also done is just accelerated the pace, the demands, the needs of the business. And so it's become, yes, maybe a little bit easier in some senses, but so much more complex and so much more challenging." |
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