At this stage of the game, AI agents feel more like an inevitability than like breaking news.
Companies are churning them out left and right. But, unlike some products, repetition doesn’t necessarily equate to redundancy.
AI agents can speed up the work that advertisers are already doing and allow for conversations between multiple platforms.
The latest foray into the space comes from Optable, which announced a new agentic collaboration initiative on Wednesday. The release introduces AI agents into Optable’s identity management and data collaboration platform, which allows clients to improve and execute their workflows with the help of AI and more effectively integrate with multiple tech platforms.
“This is what data collaboration looks like in the age of AI,” said Optable Co-Founder and CEO Vlad Stesin in the release.
Almost perfect
One of the main draws of the platform, Stesin told AdExchanger, is improved audience monetization for publishers. The new agents tap into advertisers’ briefs and audience data, connecting each campaign to its most relevant audiences – and even generating new ones.
Marketers often set out with a preconceived idea of what their “perfect audience” looks like, but that audience doesn’t always align with their goals, Alex Blum, COO of game engine and ad tech company Unity, told AdExchanger. Through running multiple or lengthy campaigns, Unity often helps its clients realize that “what they had in mind at the beginning ends up not being the most effective audience for what they’re actually trying to achieve,” he said.
Now, he added, Unity has “a more robust, nuanced ability to create custom audiences” with access to first-party data from brands and marketers that are partnering with them through Optable’s new solution.
There are two ways of realizing that the audience an advertiser is targeting isn’t, in fact, the most effective audience for them to reach, said Blum: an “iterative process,” which requires testing and relaunching the campaign to see who responds, or through an agent, who can flag inaccuracies about audience targeting up front.
Optable’s agentic collaboration “[shortens] the cycle” between kicking off a campaign and generating results by reaching the right people, said Blum. Less time spent on campaign revision means less spend, he added, resulting in higher ROAS.
Briefer briefs
The agentic collaboration also allows for easier interoperability with other ad tech vendors.
Optable is partnered with companies, including Newton Research and Rill Data, Stesin said, which provide measurement insights and targeting data. Using LLMs prompted by natural language makes integrating data like customer personas and measurement tracking from these external platforms “easier than ever before,” he said.
And, of course, Stesin added, like all solutions rooted in automation, Optable’s launch also touts improved speed and scale, both in terms of debugging and general ad ops.
Increased speed has been one of the main appeals for Unity, which is constantly “inundated with RFPs,” as Blum put it.
“We have a limited number of humans that can consume this growing volume of content and do a really good job,” he said, noting how long it takes for a human team to read an RFP, thoroughly understand a campaign, convey it effectively to an ad planner and finally manage and execute the campaign successfully. Handing over the initial intake and summarization step to AI agents, said Blum, leaves humans to focus solely on running the campaign and is “the initial use case that is really going to be beneficial.”
Eventually, Optable intends to have an array of agents each specialized in its own task, from planner agents to buyer agents to seller agents. Some customers are already building out their own agents with insights specific to their business, said Stesin.
“What do you do with unlimited insights?” Stesin asked. The ability to explore that question, he said, “is something that is new and really exciting.”
