"When AI is a bubble, and talking about AI being a bubble is a bubble ... what do you do? Right, you start talking about AI agents. And AI... agentic... what does it matter? Once you put out a new message, you quickly find a small group of people most likely to respond. You harvest that group fast, performance drops, you change the message, find a new cohort, repeat."
"Talking about it would be one thing. What is happening right now is something else entirely: the line between a bull market for agents and bullying everyone into believing agents are the thing is getting blurry. And the rhetoric always has to be so bloody dramatic: an earthquake, a paradigm shift, another revolution... Yet watching it unfold often feels a lot more like watching a soap opera-level drama."
"Agentic is supposed to make it easier for buyers to discover audiences and buy ads across platforms in a standardised way. Sounds a bit like launching a brand-new invention called Kettle 2.0 and proudly announcing it "boils water", no? Sounds familiar? It was literally the promise of programmatic. Luckily, agentic ad tech is here now to save us from the complexity programmatic created."
Agentic ad tech shifts focus from AI to AI agents as marketers rapidly target small responsive cohorts, harvesting them until performance declines and messages change. A small group of established companies introduced an "agentic" protocol, framing agentic solutions as standardized means to discover audiences and buy ads across platforms. The rhetoric casts agents as revolutionary while echoing earlier programmatic promises. MCP (Model Context Protocol) accelerated interest by enabling claims of greater context-awareness and interoperability, raising concerns about manufactured consensus, self-fulfilling hype cycles, and oversold expectations.
Read at Exchangewire
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