# Ad Tech Briefing: Agentic AI, interoperability and control dominate Cannes Lions announcements > Source: > Published: 2026-06-23 04:01:00+00:00 # Ad Tech Briefing: Agentic AI, interoperability and control dominate Cannes Lions announcements Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. [More from the series →](https://digiday.com/series/cannes/) The 2026 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity coincided with a “red weather warning” to note dangerously high temperatures across much of continental Europe, a climatic phenomenon that reflects the pace of competition as the ad industry meets at its annual flagship gathering. Of course, it wouldn’t be a trade show without a host of announcements from some of the industry’s leading lights, and since you’re most likely busy, Digiday decided to offer you a quick rundown of those most pertinent to the ad tech beat. If there was a single theme running through this year’s Cannes Lions ad tech announcements, it was the industry’s attempt to move beyond AI-assisted tools and toward agentic systems capable of making, coordinating, and executing advertising decisions. Agency holding groups, ad tech vendors, and media companies all unveiled products aimed at automating workflows, connecting buyers and sellers, and creating the standards needed for AI agents to interact across the digital advertising ecosystem. **Omnicom and Netflix combine audience data with AI creative** Omnicom Media unfurled a partnership with Netflix that combines Acxiom audience data, an asset it gained via way of its blockbuster merger with Interpublic Group, with Netflix’s advertising and AI capabilities. From here, it hopes to help advertisers create more relevant advertising experiences within streaming environments while improving measurement and performance analysis. It thus demonstrates how agency-owned data assets are increasingly being paired with AI-generated creative and premium streaming inventory. **WPP Media seeks standards for agentic buying** WPP Media announced a Buyer Agent for video alongside an agentic standards initiative involving major broadcasters, streaming platforms, and industry bodies. The goal is to establish technical and governance standards for how buyer and seller agents interact in premium video environments. Participants include Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Comcast Advertising, IAB Tech Lab, and Prebid. Elsewhere, governance, interoperability, and transparency were recurring themes as companies sought to reassure buyers that greater automation would not come at the expense of control. **Amazon’s AI-powered workflows** Amazon Ads used the conference to showcase a series of AI-driven enhancements designed to automate campaign planning, optimization, and creative execution. The updates are intended to reduce operational complexity for advertisers while encouraging greater use of Amazon’s advertising ecosystem. The announcement reflects the e-commerce giant’s push to frame itself as both a media platform and an AI-enabled marketing infrastructure provider. **Index Exchange backs cultural targeting** Meanwhile, Index Exchange partnered with Culture Hive and Subjective to launch autonomous cultural optimization for premium CTV campaigns. The offering uses cultural signals and AI-driven decisioning to help advertisers align campaigns with audience interests and behaviors in real time. **Zeta expands AI agents into agency workflows** Zeta Global used Cannes Lions to expand its Athena AI platform further into agency operations, with Stagwell among its launch partners. The move reflects increasing competition among marketing technology providers to become the intelligence layer that sits above media execution platforms. **Magnite’s agent-to-agent advertising** Magnite introduced Magnite Orchestration, a framework designed to facilitate interactions between buyer agents and seller agents across premium advertising inventory. The system is intended to support automated campaign planning, inventory discovery, and transaction workflows. Magnite is using the launch to position itself as a provider of infrastructure for the emerging agentic advertising market, where software agents rather than humans increasingly manage elements of media trades. **PubMatic brings creators into CTV** PubMatic unveiled Creator Marketplace, a programmatic marketplace designed to connect creator-led media businesses with advertiser demand and automated buying systems. By making creator inventory more accessible through programmatic channels, PubMatic aims to bridge the gap between the creator economy and traditional digital advertising workflows. The initiative also reflects the growing importance of connected TV as a destination for creator content. **Smartly’s orchestration layer ** Smartly launched Synapse, an AI orchestration and memory layer designed to coordinate the activities of its various AI agents. Rather than focusing on a single automation tool, the company is developing a system to manage context, decision-making, and performance data across multiple marketing functions. The announcement illustrates how vendors are increasingly focused on connecting AI tools together rather than deploying them in isolation. **The bigger picture** Taken together, the announcements suggest the industry is entering a new phase of AI adoption, with the conversation shifting away from individual AI features and toward the infrastructure required to operate autonomous systems at scale. Whether through orchestration layers, buyer agents, creator marketplaces, or interoperability standards, the common objective is evidently to enable AI systems to transact, optimize, and collaborate across the industry supply chain while maintaining sufficient transparency and governance for marketers to trust them. ## What we heard “The announcements next week at Cannes are going to really pile up! Everyone will all of a sudden now have an end-to-end agentic solution.” *– An industry WhatsApp group participant shares a tacit PoV on the industry’s herd mentality. * ## Numbers to know **$63.9 billion**:** WPP Media**remained the world’s largest media holding group by billings in 2025**$62.4 billion**:** Publicis Media**ranked second globally and was the fastest-growing major holding group**$48.5 billion**:** Omnicom Media Group**ranked third worldwide with a 10% market share, although the figure excludes IPG’s Mediabrands**$27.1 billion**:** IPG Mediabrands**ranked fourth as a standalone holding group prior to its integration into Omnicom *Source: COMvergence Full-Year 2025 Global Billings & Market Share report* ## What we’ve covered ** Cannes Briefing: The ad industry’s power shifts, mapped in sand**LinkedIn moved off the beach and onto a rooftop at the Carlton. Snap, once commanding its own perch at La Malmaison, is now sharing space inside Sport Beach. Reddit has scaled back to something it is apparently calling a pop-up deli. [Media Buying Briefing: How Sport Beach became a big Cannes Lions destination — and a business](https://digiday.com/media-buying/media-buying-briefing-how-sport-beach-became-a-big-cannes-lions-destination-and-a-business/) Sport Beach kicked off as Stagwell’s beachside activation at the 2023 Cannes Lions festival but has since grown into a [standalone business unit](https://digiday.com/marketing/sports-guidance-to-brands-from-three-sources-keep-the-fan-top-of-mind-and-you-might-just-win/) in the challenger holding company as its popularity at Cannes Lions surged each year. ## What we’re reading [The Trade Desk forms a travel and hospitality media network](https://www.adexchanger.com/marketers/the-trade-desk-forms-a-travel-and-hospitality-media-network/) The Trade Desk expanded its relationships with a host of travel, hospitality, and mobility-focused commerce media partners, including Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airlines’ Kinetic Media, and Riot Media. **Horizon Media builds the plumbing for agentic ad buying** The agency has built a software layer into its platform, Horizon OS Blu, so its ad-buying agents can interact with agents from adtech partners (including Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob, Smartly, and others) as well as agents built by media companies (such as Fox, Disney, TikTok, and NBCUniversal). [Get ready for Disney’s big AI ads push](https://www.businessinsider.com/disneys-ai-generated-tv-ads-set-to-launch-in-july-2026-6) The company is preparing to launch a beta version of a tool for AI-generated TV ads in July, a Disney exec said at an internal meeting, according to an audio recording shared with Business Insider. **Trump’s immigration enforcers look into buying ad data. Industry insiders fear what comes next** The trillion-dollar industry that amasses and shares troves of Americans’ information is confronting a new ethical quandary — the Trump administration’s interest in wielding this data to potentially further its sweeping immigration agenda. ### More in Media Buying #### [ Omnicom Media and Disney Advertising collaborate to enable sequential ads in streaming ](https://digiday.com/media-buying/omnicom-media-and-disney-advertising-collaborate-to-enable-sequential-ads-in-streaming/) Omnicom Media and Disney have implemented a connected TV ad solution that enables dynamic sequential storytelling across VOD and live programming. #### [ Prediction markets and sportsbook brands compete to capitalize on World Cup betting market ](https://digiday.com/media-buying/prediction-markets-and-sportsbook-brands-compete-to-capitalize-on-world-cup-betting-market/) The World Cup is expected to provide the biggest sports gambling market in history. Prediction market platforms and sportsbooks hope to take advantage with a heavy focus on performance channels. #### [ Media Buying Briefing: How Sport Beach became a big Cannes Lions destination — and a business ](https://digiday.com/media-buying/media-buying-briefing-how-sport-beach-became-a-big-cannes-lions-destination-and-a-business/) Sport Beach started as a one-slide concept. It’s since grown into one of Cannes Lions’ most popular activations – and a standalone business unit for holdco Stagwell.