“I’ll have my agent talk to your agent.”
Move over, RTB, because there’s a new way of buying ads in town.
On Thursday, Swivel, an AI sales and ad ops automation company, and CTV ad platform Olyzon announced a partnership, bringing buy-side and sell-side agents into one conversation.
The partnership marks a step toward a fully agentic marketplace, where agents can not only determine the best inventory for an advertiser, but also access inventory that wasn’t previously available through the bid stream and execute campaigns.
Swivel’s and Olyzon’s agents connect via AdCP, an open-source standard built on top of MCP that functions as a shared language through which agents across different companies and platforms can communicate.
One of the partnership’s early brand clients is the Pierre Fabre Group, a pharmaceutical and dermo-cosmetics company that sells products from oncology treatment to facial moisturizer. Since it’s based in France, where pharmaceutical advertising isn’t permitted, its ads business is solely on the dermo-cosmetics side.
Historically, Pierre Fabre has mostly targeted French audiences across social, Global Chief Digital Officer Tom El-Bez told AdExchanger, but its work with Olyzon has focused on advertising to US audiences on CTV. In the past, Pierre Fabre’s US advertising has “not been good,” said El-Bez, so the company wanted to reconsider its US operations. Its Avène brand was already popular among Americans, he said, so it opted to focus its first campaign with Olyzon on the brand’s new scar-repairing cream called Cicalfate.
Get it straight
Olyzon (which happens to be named after a Tupac album) helps advertisers determine where to place their ads through a standard agentic workflow. Advertisers upload a campaign brief, and Olyzon’s agents refine the targeting based on data pulled from its internal database, the advertiser’s website and historical campaigns they’ve run with the brand (if applicable) to determine what shows and channels are the best fit by giving each one a relevance score, said Jules Minvielle, co-founder and CEO of Olyzon.
Then, its agents connect with Swivel’s agents. The agents fall into three camps: trafficking (developing line items and targeting and automating creation), yield (optimizing delivery and pricing for live campaigns) and seller (we’ll let you figure that one out).
Swivel, on the other hand, is focused exclusively on the sell side – “perfectly complementary” to Olyzon, said Frans Vermeulen, co-founder and president of Swivel. It pulls live data from ad servers to track shifts in demand signals and updates a campaign’s price floors and deployment accordingly.
Pierre Fabre isn’t “fully dependent” on Olyzon’s platform, said El-Bez. It still manually uploads its own product targets and media audiences. Olyzon then generates a list of channels that index most highly against Pierre Fabre’s audiences. (For instance, he said, women between the ages of 40 and 50 have apparently been watching a lot of the new age-gap reality show “Age of Attraction” lately.) Olyzon then targets the specific users watching those shows and channels.
Olyzon helps Pierre Fabre restructure its ads for CTV formats that might need to be reshaped or cut down in length. It also offers “widgets” with visual enhancements, said El-Bez, like the option to add a product image levitating in the corner of the screen.
The entire process is very straightforward, said El-Bez, thanks to the intuitive nature of Olyzon’s platform. “I think that a toddler could build a campaign within their platform, to be honest,” he added.
Winning biz
Many programmatic TV ads end up being “very simple,” said Vermeulen, especially due to RTB specifications that limit ad length and structure. The partnership addresses this concern.
With agentic buys, advertisers can experiment with more “complicated or linked experiences,” he said. For instance, if an advertiser wanted to show up on live sports, they could specifically buy the first or last slot of every ad break, or a full-screen takeover at the end of the game.
Direct, agentic buys have particularly helped Pierre Fabre as a company with a smaller budget whose business was “not really interesting” to many larger DSPs, said El-Bez. But having all channels aggregated in one place “broadens our accessible inventory,” he said.
It also saves money on the agency side, he added, since Pierre Fabre needs to work with fewer teams now that it’s working directly with the agents that orchestrate the buys.
Living in limbo
If brands no longer need as much help from agencies, then what about DSPs? Is the programmatic model outdated, now that agents can carry out transactions with even greater specificity?
From Minvielle’s perspective, the answer is yes – at least in the realm of CTV. Advertisers “end up paying a DSP and an SSP fee for something that can be processed in a different way in an agentic world,” said Minvielle.
However, not everyone agrees that programmatic is on its way out.
Sometimes, a specific DSP is the most direct way to get access to certain inventory, said El-Bez, and many agencies are still reliant on DSP partnerships. (If only one DSP offers a certain channel, Minvielle added, the agents have to plug into it the “old-fashioned way, through APIs.” How quickly the tides turn.)
Plus, if an advertiser is working across a variety of media channels with access to thousands of publishers, programmatic can cast a uniquely wide net – after all, that’s kind of the point of programmatic, Vermeulen pointed out. In that world, he said, working with a DSP or SSP “makes sense.”
But for a lot of channels, like CTV, he said, “I think there’s a better way.”
