This issue arrives at a moment when the industry's biggest structural tensions are no longer theoretical. We are executing. AI agents are buying media. Holding companies are cutting out intermediaries in real time. The ad supply chain is under more scrutiny than it has faced in years, and the pressure is landing on every commercial agreement you have with your agency partners.
We have curated articles that connect the dots across AI, transparency, agency economics, influencer governance, production, and procurement's evolving role. The themes are not separate. They are the same story told from different angles, and the through line is this: the brands and procurement teams with the clearest governance today will be the best positioned for what is being built right now.
- Agentic media buying is now live, not a pilot. Audit how much of your working budget actually reaches publishers and what sits in the middle.
- The burden of proof has shifted to vendors. Demand itemized breakdowns of your programmatic supply path and ask every partner what its fee buys.
- AI is changing creative economics. Ask for deliverable-level rate cards that separate AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-completed work.
- The least governed categories are now the most exposed. Apply the same transparency standards to influencer, PR, and production that you already apply to media.
The agency value crisis is real, and procurement has a role in fixing it
The agency value crisis is not new, but it has reached a breaking point. Clients are cutting fees, agencies are cutting staff, and both sides are ending up with less than they started with. The result is a doom loop: reduced investment leads to weaker work, which leads to weaker results, which leads to further cuts. Procurement is often blamed for accelerating this spiral through rate compression. This piece argues the opposite is true. When procurement functions strategically, it is one of the few forces capable of interrupting that cycle.
The fix is not paying more. It is paying smarter: rethinking scope definitions, aligning incentives around outcomes rather than hours, and creating governance structures that reward agency performance rather than just punishing overruns. Procurement at its best does not extract value from agencies. It creates the conditions under which agencies can deliver it.
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Omnicom is cutting out the ad tech middlemen with AI agents
Omnicom has moved from pilot to live: the holding company has executed real media buys for several clients using an agent-to-agent framework that purchases ad inventory directly from publishers, bypassing the ad tech intermediaries that have long taken a slice of every media dollar. Built on the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), the system lets software autonomously negotiate and execute deals without a human hand in the middle. CEO John Wren called intermediaries a toll paid ultimately by clients. Head of AI Paolo Yuvienco confirmed the buys are live and already flowing spend to publishers.
For procurement, this is not an abstraction. The question your agency should be answering in every media review is: how much of our working budget actually reaches publishers, and what sits in the middle? Agentic buying may make that an easier number to audit, and a harder one to hide.
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The agentic marketplace is here. Where does that leave DSPs and SSPs?
A new partnership between Swivel, a sell-side AI automation firm, and Olyzon, a CTV ad platform, is giving us our clearest preview yet of what an agentic ad marketplace actually looks like. Using AdCP, an open-source standard built on the Model Context Protocol, buy-side and sell-side agents can discover inventory, negotiate, execute campaigns, and optimize delivery without passing through traditional DSP or SSP layers. Early brand client Pierre Fabre reports broader inventory access and fewer agency fees as a result.
The implications for clients are significant. If agentic workflows begin to replicate what DSPs and SSPs currently do, procurement needs to understand which vendor fees survive that shift and which do not. Contracts written for a managed-service world will need renegotiating for an agent-first one. Start by auditing what you are paying the middle today.
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Jeff Green says the ad supply chain is finally being cleaned up, and every middleman must earn its fee
Speaking at the POSSIBLE conference in Miami Beach, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green delivered some of the bluntest language the industry has heard in years on ad supply chain opacity. In the past month alone, he said, more supply chain cleanup has happened than in the prior year, and the prior year saw more progress than the previous fifteen combined. Every company sitting between advertiser and publisher must now demonstrate what value it actually creates, or expect to be removed.
This is the operating environment procurement teams have been asking for, one where the burden of proof has shifted to vendors. Use it. Demand itemized breakdowns of your programmatic supply path. Ask each technology partner explicitly: what does your fee buy, and what would it cost to route around you? Green has framed this moment as opportunity. So should you.
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From influence to integrity: why brands need a compliance management system for influencer marketing
As influencer marketing matures from experimental add-on to performance-driven channel, the governance infrastructure around it has not kept pace. This piece makes the case for a Compliance Management System that spans the full campaign lifecycle, from pre-contracting standard clauses through post-campaign documentation retention. Crucially, it assigns clear responsibility: marketing steers, legal sets guardrails, and procurement ensures contract consistency and vendor integrity across every influencer relationship.
The ANA's finding that only 51 percent of marketers have full clarity on what their agencies pay influencers is not just a transparency problem. It is a compliance exposure. Brands are increasingly held jointly accountable for disclosure failures, even when the influencer is at fault. A compliance system shifts this from a reactive risk to a managed one. If your influencer governance still lives in a spreadsheet, this article is the business case for changing that.
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Transforming creative agency efforts and fees in the AI era: it can be done now
Michael Farmer, author of the forthcoming Madison Avenue Revisited, argues that the shift from human to AI-assisted creative deliverables demands a complete restructuring of how agencies price their work, and that brands do not have to wait for the industry to catch up. Using ScopeMetrics, he maps how AI-assisted adaptations carry lower rate card prices than human-originated work, while original productions with real actors retain higher value. The distinction, he argues, is not theoretical. It is calculable and contractable now.
Procurement takeaway: the next time you renegotiate a creative agency agreement, ask for a deliverable-level rate card that explicitly separates AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-completed work. Bundled fees obscure the savings AI is already generating inside agencies, savings that should, in part, flow back to clients.
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How a room full of marketing procurement leaders is quietly redefining content production
Content production has become one of the most under-governed areas in the marketing supply chain, and some of the most forward-thinking procurement leaders are quietly changing that. This piece explores how brands are rethinking their production operating models: moving away from project-by-project agency briefs toward integrated frameworks that treat content production as a managed category with its own KPIs, benchmarks, and governance structures. The shift is not about cutting production budgets. It is about making them defensible.
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The world's indie producers are sounding the alarm on in-house production
The Independent World Producers Alliance has issued a formal warning to advertisers: agency holding companies are systematically steering work toward their own in-house production operations, and the motive is margin, not client outcomes. In a market where advertisers believe they are choosing best-in-class production partners, the alliance argues they are increasingly being channeled toward a captive supply chain they cannot see into. The question to ask in your next production review: who decided this work would go in-house, and who benefited from that decision?
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As adland talks itself down, Justin Thomas-Copeland is rebuilding the 4As for the next era
Justin Thomas-Copeland has spent months listening, holding 70 conversations with agency founders and CEOs since October, and his conclusion cuts against the industry's current mood: advertising is not in terminal decline, but it is changing shape fast. His response is to restructure the 4As around it: a new growth team, one unified service model, and a push to turn research, events, and training into actual products. AI tools for members. A cleaner front door. Less trade body, more service platform.
For procurement professionals, the 4As' transformation is a useful signal. When the industry's own trade body is rebuilding around utility and measurable member value, the broader message is clear: relationship value is no longer sufficient. Every agency partner you work with is being asked the same question Thomas-Copeland is asking his own organization: what are you actually delivering, and can you prove it?
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The chaos tax: are you capturing AI value, or just funding disorder?
Atmos Partners' Chaos Tax point of view makes an uncomfortable argument: most organizations are not benefiting from AI. They are paying a hidden price for deploying it without a coherent strategy. The data behind the argument is sobering. McKinsey finds that 80 percent of organizations have seen no EBIT impact from AI despite significant investment. Harvard Business Review reports that 45 percent of leaders cite the absence of a clear AI strategy as their primary blocker. And Carnegie Mellon and Stanford research shows that agentic AI performs 50 percent worse than humans in complex, real-world tasks when deployed without proper structure.
For procurement, this is both a warning and a brief. Before approving the next AI vendor or platform, ask: what problem does this solve, how will we measure it, and who owns the outcome? The brands and procurement teams that answer those questions first will capture the value. Everyone else will fund the chaos.
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PR and procurement: a conversation with PR Council's Kim Sample
In advance of the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference, MediaPost sat down with PR Council President Kim Sample for a candid conversation about PR's uneasy relationship with procurement. Her core argument: when procurement enters only at the contract stage and then steps back, the ongoing performance conversation never happens, and that gap costs everyone. She calls the ideal a magic triangle of alignment between client, agency, and procurement, and argues that when it works, outcomes are measurably better.
She also raised something worth noting: as AI answer engines are trained on earned media rather than paid media, brands that have underinvested in PR are becoming invisible at the moment of consumer decision. PR has historically been one of the most procurement-light marketing categories. That needs to change. Clear scopes, performance KPIs, and ongoing governance in PR relationships are not administrative overhead. They are how you ensure the investment actually lands.
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Women in Marketing Procurement: 2 hosts. 40 brands. 100 ways to optimize your content budget.
The Women in Marketing Procurement community gathered for one of its most well-attended sessions yet, bringing together procurement and marketing operations leaders from 40 brands to tackle one of the most pressing questions in the category: how do you optimize content budgets without compromising creative quality? The session surfaced frameworks, benchmarks, and practical governance structures that participants are already applying inside their organizations.
The energy in the room was a reminder of why this community exists. Marketing procurement is stronger when its practitioners share what is working. If you were not in the room, you can still benefit from what came out of it.
Learn more →A focused discussion to understand your situation and determine the right starting point for your marketing procurement practice.
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