By Joe Root, CEO and co-founder, Permutive
Advertising in the programmatic era has concentrated too much power within a handful of closed ecosystems. For years, agencies have watched margins compress while intermediaries and platforms captured the upside.
Now the economics are breaking in a new way. Clients are saying, “AI should make you more efficient, so we’ll pay you less.” Billable hours are increasingly worth 90 cents on the dollar. The traditional agency model simply doesn’t add up.
Agentic buying offers a way out. But it works only if you start with the right foundation: the ability to understand sell-side data.
That’s what makes WPP’s strategy a bellwether for other agencies.
What WPP just told the market
WPP’s acquisition of InfoSum wasn’t a side bet. The holding company effectively signaled that the center of gravity for the next-generation agency is a data collaboration platform, not a DSP login.
To make money in a world of AI and shrinking fees, agencies need to own their decisioning logic (their agents), own or rent the data foundation those agents run on, and move execution closer to publishers, not deeper into programmatic pipes.
Why? Because the agency P&L is shifting from selling time to trading outcomes.
Principal trading, buying for 25 and delivering for 30, works only if you can see the market clearly, act directly with supply, and keep more of the value you create. That’s impossible when 60–80% of the value is stripped out by the programmatic supply chain.
Looking at this problem, WPP has concluded that in order to survive, it has to rebuild the value chain, starting with data collaboration. It solved it the way a holding company can: it bought its own platform.
Few agencies have that option. But they’ll still need that foundation.
Why programmatic can’t carry the next era
Programmatic was supposed to democratize buying. Instead it fragmented buying. Layers of DSPs, SSPs, and identity providers created a system where agencies lost control over transparency and economics, publishers saw their content and audiences commoditized, and the open internet traded performance for “efficiency.”
At its best, programmatic was efficient. But it was insufficiently effective, especially compared with Google and Meta, which both married rich, first-party signals to tight feedback loops and frictionless buying.
We’ve entered the Outcomes Era. Efficiency and automation no longer matter unless they drive measurable business results and sustainable economics for agencies and publishers. Yet programmatic as we know it can’t deliver this for publishers.
Nor is agentic buying “programmatic with chatbots.” It’s a different way of buying: agents negotiating and executing closer to the supply, on top of shared, high-fidelity data. That requires a different system.
Agents without data collaboration are just another UI
There’s a lot of noise about agents in advertising right now. You can bolt an “agent” onto almost anything, including a DSP, a planning tool, and an analytics stack.
But if the underlying data is thin, delayed, or trapped in silos, your “agent” is just a nicer interface on the same fragile infrastructure.
To change the economics, you need agents that see publisher-side signals, such as content, context, cohorts, and behaviors, rather than just a handful of bidstream fields. The agents need to connect those signals to advertiser outcomes such as conversions, sales, and lifetime value. And the agents need to operate in environments where they can actually negotiate and execute directly with publishers.
That’s what data collaboration enables: privacy-safe connections between advertiser and publisher data, interoperability across many publishers rather than one walled garden, and a neutral layer where agents can reason about supply and demand without leaking IP or exposing raw data.
WPP is effectively saying: If you want agents capable of delivering business outcomes (and better agency economics), start with data collaboration.
What this means for the rest of the agency world
If you’re not WPP, you’re still facing the same pressures: shrinking fees, clients demanding AI-driven efficiency and a programmatic supply chain that eats most of the value on the open internet.
You probably can’t buy your own InfoSum. But you can adopt the strategic lesson WPP just sent the market: the next era of agency economics starts with better data and closer access to supply.
That means three things:
- Data collaboration must move to the center of the operating model. It can’t be an add-on or a side tool.
- You need access to publisher signals, not just more bidstream data. That’s what makes agentic buying outperform the legacy stack.
- Your agents are your IP. Agencies should design and control their decisioning logic, even as they build on shared data environments.
WPP’s play is to own the foundation. For everyone else, the play is to build on a stronger foundation while keeping your agents and strategy as your competitive edge.
Agentic buying won’t change agency economics because it’s innovative. It will change them because, built on better data and tighter publisher connections, it delivers outcomes the old stack simply can’t.
