Open Garden. You were the first media agency in Europe to test a fully agentic integration with the SSP PubMatic on a CTV campaign. What exactly are we talking about?
Maurits Abrahamjan (Abovo Maxlead). We plugged our proprietary platform, Mediavision AI, into PubMatic's agentic infrastructure, AgenticOS, for a travel advertiser.
As you say, it was a first, and the point was to let us run a CTV campaign from one single environment. In this case our Mediavision AI platform, where we host our campaign history combined with external sources (search, audiences and so on) to generate media plans. Integrating that platform with AgenticOS let us add the campaign setup layer.
Why did that layer matter?
The CTV ecosystem is very fragmented today. To run a single campaign, a media agency can be forced to juggle five or six different systems, since some inventory or environments are only reachable through specific platforms.
That dispersion inevitably creates a lot of operational drag. This is precisely where an agentic interface adds value: whether there are five, ten or fifteen platforms in the background matters little, since everything is driven from one unified interface.
What was the inventory scope?
The main goal was to validate that the connection really worked in operational conditions. We wanted to do it with some volume, though, which meant relying on relatively broad inventory. PubMatic has access to several key environments in our ecosystem, notably Talpa, a major video and CTV player in the Netherlands.
The platform is also already integrated with manufacturers such as TCL and LG, as well as with Rakuten.
What were the main technical difficulties?
We are still on very new ground, which necessarily means some adjustments. Some are fairly simple, like currency conversion - we work in euros while their system is in dollars - or time zone handling, with US platforms in UTC and our operations in CET.
Others are more complex, notably around creative management. Creatives still have to be attached to campaigns manually through a URL.
We are at an early stage, but we are already working on fully automating that process, with agents able to push creatives into the right environments. We are clearly in a continuous improvement loop, run jointly by their technical teams and ours.
Was the connection with PubMatic made through MCP?
The integration is built on MCP, with a clear goal: connect as many players as possible in order to centralise both planning and execution. And on that front, mindsets have shifted markedly.
Eighteen months ago, when we asked for APIs to pull data or feed our data warehouse, the answer was usually no. Today those same players come back to us with connections already available. There is real acceleration.
In your case, was the campaign fully automated?
No, there were human checkpoints at every stage. We had teams on both sides, operational and technical, steering the deployment. That was necessary for a first integration. There is still friction, but each iteration reduces it.
Do these systems also help identify inventory opportunities or segments you would not have found manually?
Yes, that is one of the avenues we are exploring. Some partners already allow you to query their inventory dynamically. You can ask, for example, which CTV packages are available in a given market.
Results are not always perfectly filtered today - you can still see inventory that is not geographically relevant - but it is improving fast. It is clearly part of the equation.
How is CTV buying organised at your agency today? Is it TV teams or digital teams?
We still have a fairly classic setup: one team handling traditional buying, another handling digital activation.
Most of the execution now goes through digital, but we are trying to bring the two worlds closer. We are working on agents able to build plans combining traditional television and digital video. The goal is to unify those approaches.
You also mentioned tests on addressable TV...
Yes, we have run a few addressable TV campaigns. It is interesting, but still at the adoption stage.
The market is moving fast, but many players are not yet used to buying television that way. There are also technical and structural constraints, particularly around operators and infrastructure. We think it will grow, but it will take time.
What impact can this shift have on teams?
The goal is not to cut headcount but to change the nature of the work. Automating operational tasks frees up time for higher-value work: strategy, client relationships, partner selection.
There are two views in the market: some agencies want to do more with fewer resources, others, like ours, want to use automation to increase the value delivered to clients.
What role do you see for DSPs in this new paradigm? There is bound to be a disintermediation risk...
That is an interesting question. We already see SSPs building features historically associated with DSPs. The two are converging.
In some cases it becomes possible to bypass the DSP. But DSPs keep an important role in unifying buying, notably on things like frequency control and cross-platform campaign management.
If you buy on five different platforms with no unification, you risk over-exposing the same users. So there is still real value there.
