Publishers Pump Brakes on Agentic Advertising, Betting on Direct Revenue Instead

The advertising industry has spent the better part of two years talking about agentic media buying as the future—autonomous AI systems that negotiate directly with publishers, bypass middlemen, and theoretically make the entire supply chain faster and cheaper. But inside the offices where publishers actually decide where to spend money, the conversation sounds different. It sounds like caution.

Jamie Jouning, who oversees advertising for The Economist globally, put it plainly when asked about his company's plans: he couldn't justify asking his leadership team for investment in something whose value remained unproven. "It would be very hard for me to go and seek investment from our leadership team for something that we don't know whether or not it's going to be of value to us," he said. He acknowledged the technology was on his CEO's radar and on his own, but The Economist wasn't moving aggressively into the space. "I think it's still relatively early. I don't think we'll be hitting down that route in a big way anytime soon."

When Digiday spoke with three senior commercial executives at the Advertising Week New York conference, all three described essentially the same posture: watching, testing, learning—but not committing. Danielle Varvaro, chief revenue officer at Newsweek, framed it as a measurement problem. "I can't say definitively that we have signed this deal and we're doing X, Y, and Z because we haven't," she said. The real question, from her perspective, was how to measure return on investment for brands running these kinds of campaigns. What does a test look like? How do you know if it worked? Joy Robins, The New York Times' global chief advertising officer, echoed the theme: the company was evaluating, keeping an eye on developments, but remained in the assessment phase.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the transaction—among media agencies and their clients—movement was accelerating. Agencies were moving agentic buying from experiments into live campaigns, deploying AI agents to automate transactions and purchase inventory directly from publishers while cutting out programmatic intermediaries. The gap between buy-side momentum and sell-side hesitation reflects a fundamental misalignment in incentives. According to Amit Grover, CEO of the programmatic sales firm KPI Village, publishers aren't prioritizing agentic adoption as aggressively because they're focused on generating revenue in the near term. While agentic systems promise to reduce operational costs, publishers are directing their investment dollars toward opportunities with clearer, faster paths to revenue—the kind of bets that can offset losses from declining referral traffic and shrinking programmatic ad revenue.

There's also the matter of trust and control. Agentic systems, by their nature, operate with some degree of autonomy. Agents can make unauthorized decisions or drift outside the boundaries advertisers set. Agencies are still figuring out how to audit these systems, monitor spending, catch errors, and maintain human oversight. The infrastructure needed to make agentic buying trustworthy, transparent, and scalable at scale is still being built.

Instead of betting heavily on agentic automation, publishers are diversifying. The New York Times is expanding its audience targeting and measurement capabilities, with new tools expected next year. Newsweek has spent recent years building out a B2B business across verticals like healthcare and tech, offering webinars, newsletters, events, and industry rankings. The company acquired an ad network called Adprime last year and hired dedicated sales teams for these revenue streams. Newsweek's overall business is growing nearly 20 percent year over year, according to company figures. Varvaro described the strategy as creating "a curated space for 100 of the right people in the room"—a model where precision and trust matter more than raw scale.

The Economist is pursuing a similar path, broadening its advertising business by creating new sponsorship opportunities and expanding its video offerings. The publisher plans to increase its video programming from two shows a week to six starting in January and is breaking its Insider series into distinct franchises focused on technology, money, and geopolitics—each designed to attract sponsorships. Jouning is also trying to pull in more consumer-facing and luxury advertisers, groups that traditionally haven't been core to The Economist's base. The pitch is straightforward: advertisers increasingly want to work with publishers who can guarantee trust and credibility. "Advertisers are increasingly looking to work with brands who can guarantee that sort of level of trust and that level of credibility," Jouning said. The Economist is also expanding its client-commissioned research offerings.

What emerges from these conversations is a publishing industry making a deliberate choice: rather than chase the promise of agentic automation, publishers are investing in the assets that agentic systems can't easily replicate—direct relationships with audiences, brand authority, specialized expertise, and the ability to create curated experiences for specific groups of advertisers. It's a bet that in an era of AI-driven disruption, credibility and trust are worth more than operational efficiency.