A media agency has partnered with iHeartMedia to launch what the companies call the ad industry’s first agentic streaming audio media campaign.
Butler/Till said this is the first time that “premium streaming audio inventory has been purchased through an AI-powered, agentic media-buying workflow.”
This also has implications for how broadcast radio time will be bought and sold in the future.
In agentic media buying, they said, AI agents evaluate the campaign objectives, find opportunities and carry out media buying dynamically using defined business rules.
Humans do the “strategy, governance and oversight” while AI “improves the speed, efficiency and adaptability of campaign execution,” the companies said, calling it a step toward “a more intelligent, responsive and efficient media marketplace.”
The campaign was for an unnamed U.S. agricultural solutions company.
They said the agentic buy “delivered streaming audio 42 percent more efficiently than the advertiser’s traditional direct buying benchmark.”
They also reported that in podcasting, 48 percent of impressions “were delivered in high-value, non-skippable mid-roll placements, compared with 33 percent allocated to mid-roll in the traditional plan.”
“The campaign demonstrates how artificial intelligence is moving beyond planning and optimization to participate in the execution of premium media transactions,” iHeart and Butler/Till said in a press release.
They said the objectives of the campaign were defined by the client and that it was under “strategic” human oversight.
The announcement was made by Lisa Coffey, chief business officer for iHeartMedia, and Scott Ensign, chief strategy officer at Butler/Till.
Ensign called agentic media “the next evolution” of how media are bought and sold, following on programmatic buying, private marketplaces and connected TV.
iHeartMedia describes itself the largest audio company in the United States, with major broadcast, podcast and streaming assets. It is expanding the use of agentic media buying and plans to make broadcast radio time available through such transactions later this year.
As noted in the release, iHeart recently launched a capability called AudioGraph that promises to provide “digital-like targeting, identity-based planning, measurement and attribution” to broadcast radio in a big way.
It believes this will help connect radio better to the broad digital advertising ecosystem.
The companies said that in the past, agentic buying “has largely been limited to media channels already accessible through programmatic technology.” They said that bringing radio into this ecosystem will be an important shift in how advertisers manage campaigns.
