With Adventic, Prisma Media wants to let media agencies query, plan and buy its ad inventory through an AI agent, starting with digital before gradually extending to print. The initiative is still at launch stage, but it says a lot about how publishers intend to take back control of agentic advertising.
Prisma Media Solutions is launching its own seller agent, called Adventic Ad. The goal: let a media buyer start from a brief written in natural language and access available inventory, get planning recommendations or pull reporting data.
The setup rests on an MCP server, a technical layer that allows an AI agent to query Prisma Media's internal tools (ad servers, booking platforms), and on the ADCP protocol, designed to structure exchanges between agents in an advertising context.
The launch covers digital first. The agent is already functional end to end on Prisma Media Solutions' digital inventory, notably display and online video, whose specifications and rate cards it has mastered after ingesting the in-house documentation.
Prisma Media first connected its seller agent to its ad server, Google Ad Manager. The group now plans to extend the setup quickly to print by linking it to its internal ad space booking tool.
The longer-term ambition is to open the approach to the group's other offline media, and even to media outside Prisma Media. "Clients of our Prisma for Publishers offer will also be able to be integrated," says Bastien Deleau, deputy executive director for digital at Prisma Media.
From brief to buy: an agent covering the whole workflow
The agentic system covers several stages of the media workflow. The buyer can submit a brief, ask for a planning recommendation, check availability, identify relevant audiences, build a proposal and initiate the buy.
The agent can also act directly in the systems, creating line items for example, the campaign lines that define delivery parameters in an ad server.
The promise is simple: remove part of the friction that slows direct buying today. In a classic workflow, an agency sends a brief to the sales house, which then goes to several internal teams to check available volumes, activatable segments, placements, formats or delivery forecasts. Every change to the brief can restart the cycle.
In those conditions, waiting two days for an answer is not unusual.
"In those conditions, waiting two days for an answer is not unusual," sums up Paul Ripart, deputy director for digital and data at Prisma Media Solutions. Or dealing with an advertiser who changes its mind or its target, forcing you to start over, with the latency that implies.
Tailor-made offers through "dynamic products"
With Adventic, Prisma wants to give the agency the ability to query the offer directly, without endless back and forth. It also wants to give it more flexibility in building campaigns: with "dynamic products", the agent no longer simply serves up the sales house's pre-packaged offers.
It can recompose a bespoke product from available inventory pools, audiences and contexts. "For example, if an advertiser is looking for a female real-estate audience in a specific age bracket with a given reach target, the agent can build a combination that does not necessarily exist in the rate card," Ripart illustrates.
This is not automated special ops or brand content yet, but it opens the way to industrialising bespoke offers. It could also give rise to new commercial packages: by observing buyer requests and the combinations the agent proposes, Prisma could identify new recurring products worth standardising.
"Agentic is therefore not only a productivity lever, it can become a commercial efficiency tool," says Deleau.
He insists on one point, though: the human stays in the loop. Final campaign validation, checking what was bought and approving the creatives remain human responsibilities.
"That is particularly important for premium media, print, video, audio or television, where a sales house cannot let an inappropriate creative or an incorrect proposal through," Ripart says. The purchase order, the equivalent of the insertion order that formalises delivery conditions, also remains necessary.
Prisma chose to build its agent in-house. The sales house is not closing the door to collaborations with third-party technology players, but wants to keep control of its seller agent.
The argument is as economic as it is strategic: the seller agent becomes an extension of the salesperson and the trafficker. "Handing it entirely to an external platform would mean outsourcing a critical part of the commercial relationship and of access to inventory," Ripart says.
An economic model designed without extra cost for the buyer
On the business model, Prisma says it does not intend to pass the agent's cost on to buyers. No specific markup, then, and no new stated commission. The sales house treats the agent as an internal tool made available to the market.
"If usage generates additional revenue, the technology cost will be absorbed. If it replaces part of the current manual exchanges, the productivity gain will cover the investment," Deleau says. And if it shifts part of the budget from open auction to more direct channels, the equation becomes even more favourable.
That is where the underlying stake sits. For several years, publishers have been denouncing how little of programmatic budgets ends up in their pocket. Between 20 and 40%, after the multiple technology intermediaries have taken their cut.
The seller agent is presented as a way to make the direct channel more attractive, without giving up the speed and flexibility buyers expect.
We wanted to let buyers access a medium's value - its audiences and its inventory - as directly as possible.
In doing so, Prisma Media wants to reconcile two worlds long held apart: direct deals, whose added value rests on the direct relationship between buyer and medium, and programmatic, which delivers agility and productivity through automation.
"We wanted to let buyers access a medium's value - its audiences and its inventory - as directly as possible," Deleau says. Without going as far as replacing Prisma Media Solutions' sales teams, of course.
"This seller agent is a copilot that first frees them from part of the back office: forecast requests, internal checks, purchase orders, coordination tasks," Deleau explains, adding that the agent is applied first to standardised formats: display, online video, packaged offers, audiences, availability.
Bespoke work, brand content, special operations and the strategic relationship stay with the teams. "As do client meetings, which are the very essence of the sales job," Ripart adds.
The initiative still has to be tested by the market. Prisma is not launching Adventic with agency case studies already public, but with an operational technology and a call for buyers to start testing. "A first phase should let us frame the use cases before a wider opening in September," Deleau says. Interested parties, take note.
The point is clear. In the emerging battle over agentic media, publishers do not want to settle for being databases queried by platform or agency agents. They want to build their own interfaces, set their access rules and preserve the value of their inventory.
After the open auction, curators, clean rooms and marketplaces, a new layer is taking shape. Whether it actually simplifies media buying, or ends up adding complexity to a chain that rarely lacks any, remains to be seen.
