Brands are using AI agents in advertising to plan campaigns, buy media, produce creative, read results and talk to shoppers inside AI assistants, usually through an agency or an ad platform. Published examples include Telefónica's Movistar running a connected TV campaign through Havas, Omnicom executing agent-to-agent buys for several clients, Hershey modelling its media mix with a system of agents and Mercedes-Benz USA piloting a conversational Showroom ad in Microsoft Copilot. In almost every case a person still sets the goal and approves the decisions that commit money or speak for the brand.

TL;DR. The 21 examples below are grouped by job (planning, buying, creative, measurement and customer-facing ad formats), each with a dated source from the company involved or trade press. Brands give agents the most room in buying and measurement, and the least in consumer insight, brand voice and final deal approval. Direct buying between a buyer's agent and a publisher's agent is the newest pattern, built on shared standards led by IAB Tech Lab's AAMP and the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP).

What counts as a brand using an AI agent in advertising?

An AI agent in advertising is software that takes a goal, such as a campaign brief, and chooses the steps to reach it within limits a person has set. That separates it from rule-based automation and from a chatbot that only answers questions. A useful way to compare the examples is the earned autonomy ladder: Observe, Recommend, Draft, Human-approved action and Bounded automatic action (the five stages of earned autonomy).

Most brand examples sit at Draft or Human-approved action, and a few buying examples reach Bounded automatic action. The higher an agent climbs, the more the record of what it agreed matters. On the Alkimi Marketplace, for example, people on each side keep approval rights at the deal level, and agreed terms go into a DealSheet that is written at agreement, timestamped, held by both parties and retrievable by either side independently.

How are brands using AI agents for planning and research?

1. Mondelez (LUNA Bar): agents for brainstorming only

For the Mondelez-owned LUNA Bar, agents are limited to brainstorming, while consumer insight is developed by the marketing team (Digiday, 27 May 2026). "We are not handing it over to AI to help us develop that true consumer insight that would design the campaign," said Valerie Van Arkel, a brand director at Mondelez.

2. PMG: agentic planning across seller proposals

PMG uses agentic planning to evaluate "a much broader range of media opportunities and information" when it builds a plan, said Mike Treon, its Head of CTV Strategy (IAB Tech Lab, 22 September 2026). He was speaking about AAMP 3.0, which added OpenProposal, a specification for how sellers answer buyer briefs in a form agents can read. "What's new in AAMP 3.0 is that the reasoning travels with the proposal," Treon said.

3. Advertisers on Meta: planning a campaign by conversation

Meta is testing agentic capabilities that let advertisers plan and create a campaign, generate creative, update targeting or change budget through conversational commands, MediaPost reported from Advertising Week New York (MediaPost, 8 October 2026).

How are brands and agencies using AI agents to buy media?

A completed buy is not automatically a good one: in the Concourse Bench v1 benchmark of AI media-buying agents, 55 of 96 runs completed a buy, and 95 of 110 signed contracts promised a viewability floor below 70%. That is why the approval thresholds a brand sets matter as much as the agent's speed.

4. Movistar (Telefónica), with Havas: connected TV in Spain

PubMatic announced a connected TV campaign in Spain developed with Havas for Movistar (PubMatic, 9 June 2026). A natural language brief was processed by the Claude large language model, and agents then selected CTV inventory, applied frequency controls and brand safety settings and adjusted bids in real time within the client's own rules. Esther López, Head of Media at Telefónica, said the work showed "that agentic AI can operate with the level of rigour and performance that brands require."

Earlier campaigns on the same platform include INTERBEV in France with the trading desk Amnet (PubMatic, 31 March 2026) and Geloso Beverage Group in the United States with the agency Butler/Till (PubMatic, 9 March 2026).

5. Omnicom: agent-to-agent buys for several clients

On its first-quarter earnings call, Omnicom said it had executed live buys for several clients through an agent-to-agent framework built around the Ad Context Protocol (Digiday, 29 April 2026). "We've actually executed real media buys for several clients using our agent framework, doing agent to agent buying, which is all in service to shortening the media supply chain," said Paolo Yuvienco, Omnicom's head of AI.

6. dentsu France, with Criteo: a video campaign briefed in a few sentences

For an unnamed brand, the dentsu France team briefed the dentsu.Connect trading agent "as they would a colleague", setting out objectives, budget, dates, formats, brand constraints and targeting in a few sentences (Criteo, 4 May 2026). Connected to Criteo's Model Context Protocol (MCP), the agent turned the brief into audience definition and campaign activation without anyone logging into the Criteo interface.

7. RPA, with Newton: a trafficking agent on Yahoo DSP

Yahoo DSP reported that a trafficking agent built by Newton and the agency RPA, connected through MCP, had already executed programmatic guaranteed buys (Yahoo, 6 January 2026). Yahoo describes the agent as streamlining campaign set-up and execution while reducing manual steps.

8. Duluth Trading Company: agency-run agentic bidding

Duluth Trading Company's agency partner manages agentic bidding on the brand's behalf, while brand voice, humour and ethos stay under closer human oversight (Digiday, 12 May 2026). "We're comfortable with it because we know that our agency knows us very well," said Ellie Uberto, director of marketing at Duluth.

9. WPP Media: a Buyer Agent for Video

WPP Media is developing a Buyer Agent for Video within WPP Open, starting with linear TV, connected TV and premium video (WPP Media, 18 June 2026). It is working with media owners including Disney Advertising, NBCUniversal, Netflix and Paramount, along with IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org, on how buyer and seller agents communicate, validate and escalate decisions.

10. Rise, a Quad agency: escalation to a human approver

Rise, a Quad agency, was among the first to pilot a governance framework for autonomous campaigns on PubMatic's AgenticOS (PubMatic, 5 August 2026). When an agent meets a decision beyond its configured authority it escalates to an approver, and every agent action is logged with what it did, when, under which parameters and whether a person was in the loop.

11. The first agent-to-agent buy: LG Ads inventory, October 2025

AgenticAdvertising.org dates the first agent-to-agent media buy to 16 October 2025, with "real money, real inventory from LG Ads, real AI agents handling creative, targeting, and approval with human oversight" (AgenticAdvertising.org). MediaPost reported that the order ran live between a buyer agent built by Scope3 and a seller agent at the publisher ad server Swivel, with approvals from the two people running it (MediaPost, 16 October 2025).

How are brands using AI agents for creative?

12. Nestlé Health Science, with Amazon Ads' creative agent

Amazon Ads' agentic creative tool researches products and audiences, brainstorms, storyboards concepts and produces video and display ads, explaining its thinking at each step (Amazon Ads, 17 September 2025). "What truly sets this apart is how it explains its thought process as it's building my creative concept," said Dayexi Tomko, Brand Manager at Nestlé Health Science, an early beta tester.

13. OMRON, with Remazing: localising a video for Spain

When OMRON launched a product range across Europe in October 2025, it lacked a Spanish video, so its agency Remazing tested Amazon's Creative Agent (Amazon Ads case study, 2 June 2026). The agent transcribed and translated the UK video into Spanish with several script options. Remazing chose the translations, adjusted voice tone and edited the final cut.

Not every brand wants agents near finished creative. Stanley 1913 uses AI upstream in ideation and concept work but has "not used AI for any external-facing, consumer-facing creative", chief brand officer Kate Ridley told Digiday (Digiday, 23 July 2026).

How are brands using AI agents for measurement and reporting?

14. Hershey: a system of agents for media mix modelling

Hershey spent a year building a system of several AI agents that provides media mix modelling for its campaigns, and Digiday reports it has helped steer decisions such as a recent lean into Reddit (Digiday, 14 May 2026). On agents buying direct from publishers, Hershey's Vinny Rinaldi said: "I still think there's human intuitiveness that's needed."

15. Marketers using IAS Agent: recommendations with reasons

Integral Ad Science launched IAS Agent to help marketers surface campaign insights in real time (IAS, 16 December 2025). Users can hover over each suggestion to see what is proposed and why, then customise, override or adopt it.

16. Google Ads advertisers: Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor

Google announced two agents built on its latest Gemini models, Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor, for Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts (Google, 12 November 2025). Ads Advisor can help identify the root cause of an ad disapproval and, in some cases, make a fix for the advertiser to approve.

How are brands using AI agents in customer-facing ad formats?

17. Brava Fabrics and Mercedes-Benz USA, in Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Advertising named Brava Fabrics as its first brand agent to go live, trained on the brand's product catalogue, guidelines and tone of voice (Microsoft Advertising, 12 June 2025). Mercedes-Benz USA was a pilot partner developing a Showroom ad for the Mercedes-Maybach, a conversational format designed to mirror a real-world showroom.

18. Alexander Del Rossa: a brand agent on its own store

Microsoft describes Brand Agents as AI-powered shopping assistants that speak in a brand's voice on its own website, and the sleepwear retailer Alexander Del Rossa added one to its Shopify store (Microsoft Advertising, 8 January 2026). "Brand Agents learned our inventory and provided recommendations that required little engagement from our team," the retailer said.

19. Brands on Amazon: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands prompts

Amazon's prompts appear in shopping results and on product pages and, when clicked, may open a dialogue in Rufus or answer the shopper on the page, drawing on the brand's detail pages, Brand Store and campaign data (Amazon Ads, 10 March 2026). Introduced in open beta in November 2025, they reached general availability in the US on 25 March 2026.

20. Retailers in Google AI Mode: Direct Offers

Google introduced Direct Offers, a Google Ads pilot that lets advertisers present exclusive offers to shoppers who are ready to buy, directly in AI Mode (Google, 11 January 2026). The same announcement introduced a new open standard for agentic commerce.

21. Best Buy, Expedia and Enterprise Mobility: ads in ChatGPT

OpenAI began showing ads in ChatGPT on 9 February 2026, with Omnicom, WPP and dentsu lining up brands for the pilot (Adweek, 9 February 2026). Adweek later reported Best Buy, Expedia and Enterprise Mobility among the first brands spotted running ads there (Adweek, 19 February 2026). These are ads inside an AI assistant rather than agents working for the brand.

What are publishers and standards bodies building for brands' agents?

Agent-to-agent buying needs a seller on the other side. Netflix told advertisers in upfront week that a set of AI agents can manage, optimise and purchase ads on the platform autonomously (Adweek, 13 May 2026). IAB Australia has opened expressions of interest for a seller-side pilot using the AAMP reference implementations, "to help Australian publishers test discovery, proposal and approval workflows in a sandbox before any live spend is involved," said Jonas Jaanimagi, its Technology Lead (IAB Tech Lab, 22 September 2026).

Shared standards connect the two sides. IAB Tech Lab's AAMP is designed to cover end-to-end ad decisioning and delivery workflows, and the Ad Context Protocol, published by AgenticAdvertising.org, lets AI agents discover, plan, buy, sell and measure media. A donation from LiveRamp gave IAB Tech Lab Agentic Audiences, an open standard for how agents share identity, contextual and reinforcement signals (IAB Tech Lab, updated 28 January 2026).

What do these examples have in common?

Agents do the legwork and people approve. Bayer's Glenniss Richards put the limit plainly: AI is "making us quicker, faster, certainly more agile" but "it's not owning or controlling our campaigns" (Digiday, 12 May 2026).

Brands keep the decisions that define them. Mondelez keeps consumer insight, Duluth keeps brand voice, Stanley 1913 keeps consumer-facing creative and Hershey keeps human judgement over direct publisher buying.

Records matter once two agents agree terms. Action logs at Rise, approval workflows in the WPP Media initiative and human sign-off in the first agent-to-agent buy all answer the same question: who can show what was agreed, and when.

How should a brand test an agent before it spends real money?

The commonest failure is a mandate gap, where an agent follows the letter of its instructions and misses the intent. In a hypothetical case, a mandate that caps the price of each deal but sets no daily spend limit lets an agent agree several deals that each pass the cap and together exceed the intended budget.

That is the purpose of the Alkimi Gym, available now, where buyers and sellers build their own agents, set the rules they work to and spar against counterparty agents before any real money moves. Concourse, a live benchmarking product for AI media-buying agents, measures how those agents perform (contact).

Frequently asked questions

How are brands using AI agents in their advertising?

Brands use AI agents to plan campaigns, buy media, produce and localise creative, model results and talk to shoppers inside AI assistants, mostly through agencies and ad platforms. Named examples include Movistar, Hershey, Duluth Trading Company, Nestlé Health Science and Mercedes-Benz USA.

Which agencies are using AI agents to buy media?

Published examples include Havas for Movistar, Omnicom for several clients, dentsu France with Criteo, RPA on Yahoo DSP and Rise on PubMatic's AgenticOS. WPP Media is developing a Buyer Agent for Video with major media owners.

When was the first agent-to-agent media buy?

AgenticAdvertising.org dates it to 16 October 2025, using LG Ads inventory. A buyer agent built by Scope3 and a seller agent at Swivel carried it out live, with people approving the steps.

Do AI agents buy media without human approval?

In the published examples, agents act within limits people set, and decisions beyond those limits go back to a person. Approval workflows and action logs recur across the announcements.

What is a brand agent?

A brand agent is an AI assistant trained on a brand's catalogue, guidelines and tone of voice that talks to shoppers on the brand's behalf. Brava Fabrics went live with one through Microsoft Advertising in 2025.

How Brands Are Using AI Agents in Advertising: 21 Sourced Examples by Job