{"id":1568,"date":"2026-06-11T13:31:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T13:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/?post_type=research_pod&#038;p=1568"},"modified":"2026-06-17T13:13:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T13:13:56","slug":"agentic-media-buying-pod","status":"publish","type":"research_pod","link":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/?research_pod=agentic-media-buying-pod","title":{"rendered":"Agentic Media Buying Pod"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":1603,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"pod_status":[{"id":4,"name":"Active","slug":"active"}],"ppma_author":[{"id":26,"display_name":"Ingmar Zach","first_name":"Ingmar","last_name":"Zach","nickname":"ingmarzach","user_nicename":"ingmarzach","user_email":"ingmar.zach@wppmedia.com","biographical_info":null,"avatar_url":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ingmar.jpg","job_title":"President, Data and Intelligence","is_lead":true,"display_as_researcher":true,"order_priority":4},{"id":6,"display_name":"Robert Marshall","first_name":"Robert","last_name":"Marshall","nickname":"robert.marshall","user_nicename":"robert-marshall","user_email":"Robert.Marshall@wppmedia.com","biographical_info":null,"avatar_url":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Headshot2.jpg","job_title":"SVP Product Strategy, Data and Intelligence","is_lead":true,"display_as_researcher":true,"order_priority":4},{"id":33,"display_name":"Ben Putley","first_name":"Ben","last_name":"Putley","nickname":"ben-putley","user_nicename":"ben-putley","user_email":"ben@alkimi.org","biographical_info":"Ben Putley is CEO and co-founder of Alkimi. He has spent over a decade in digital advertising, with senior roles at News Corp and Sharethrough, where he delivered multi-million-dollar campaigns for global brands including Disney+, Heineken, and CNN. At Alkimi, Ben is applying that experience to build a marketplace where advertisers and publishers transact on their own terms.","avatar_url":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ben_P.png","job_title":"Alkimi CEO","is_lead":false,"display_as_researcher":false,"order_priority":null},{"id":34,"display_name":"Chandru Narayana","first_name":"Chandrasekhar","last_name":"Narayana","nickname":"chandru-narayana","user_nicename":"chandru-narayana","user_email":"chandru@alkimi.org","biographical_info":"Chandrasekhar Narayana is CTO and co-founder of Alkimi. He brings twenty years of experience across software architecture, complex program delivery, and the security and regulatory side of data-driven systems, with work for clients including BT, Cisco, Virgin Media, and Vodafone. His remit at Alkimi is the technical foundation of a marketplace where security, privacy, and compliance have to be right before anything else can work.","avatar_url":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/chandru.png","job_title":"Alkimi - CTO","is_lead":false,"display_as_researcher":false,"order_priority":null}],"class_list":["post-1568","research_pod","type-research_pod","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","pod_status-active"],"acf":{"subtitle":"","quarter":"Q2 2026","focus_focus":"","is_featured":false,"about_pod":"<p>Agentic Media Buying is a research pod exploring how AI agents may change the way media is planned, bought, transacted, verified, and governed across the industry. The pod brings together agencies, publishers, platforms, technologists, researchers, and commercial leaders to share experiments and build a practical understanding of what agentic buying means in real market conditions.<\/p>\n<p>Agentic buying will not be solved by one company in isolation. This pod creates a trusted space for the people closest to the change to learn together: following new tools, protocols, and experiments; inviting contributors to share what they are seeing; and turning early signals into useful discussion for the wider industry.<\/p>\n<p>The goal is shared understanding: what is real today, what still needs work, what controls need to exist, and how agencies, advertisers, publishers, and platforms can test responsibly without pushing immature risk onto the market.<\/p>\n"},"related_publications":[{"type":"research_feed","content_type":"article","title":"The Power of Collaborative Semantic Embedding Spaces","slug":"the-power-of-collaborative-semantic-embedding-spaces","date":"2026-07-03T16:12:50+00:00","quarter":"","authors":[{"id":5,"display_name":"Ted Lappas","first_name":"Ted","last_name":"Lappas","nickname":"theodoros.lappas","user_nicename":"theodoros-lappas","user_email":"Theodoros.Lappas@wpp.com","biographical_info":"Ted co-leads WPP Research and serves as Head of Data Science at Satalia. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marketing and Communication at the Athens University of Economics and Business. His research spans scalable algorithms for multimodal data, synthetic data generation, simulation-based verification for AI agents, and information diffusion and collective intelligence in expert networks.","avatar_url":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/pic.png","job_title":"Head of Data Science","is_lead":false,"display_as_researcher":true,"order_priority":1},{"id":6,"display_name":"Robert Marshall","first_name":"Robert","last_name":"Marshall","nickname":"robert.marshall","user_nicename":"robert-marshall","user_email":"Robert.Marshall@wppmedia.com","biographical_info":null,"avatar_url":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Headshot2.jpg","job_title":"SVP Product Strategy, Data and Intelligence","is_lead":true,"display_as_researcher":true,"order_priority":4}]}],"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-3-1024x687.png","featured_image_sizes":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-3-150x150.png","medium":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-3-300x201.png","large":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-3-1024x687.png","full":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-3.png"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/research_pods\/1568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/research_pods"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/research_pod"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"pod_status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fpod_status&post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms.research.wpp.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fppma_author&post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}