InMobi wants AI agents, not demand-side platforms, selling its premium commerce inventory.
A new sell-side AI agent built by the adtech company in partnership with Scope3 acts as an autonomous sales rep for advertisers who want to buy InMobi’s Glance ads. Through the tech, brands can get easy access to Glance’s 300 million active devices, as well as InMobi’s wider ad exchange.
Glance previously developed its business by placing ads on smartphone lock screens through partnerships with device manufacturers, many in Asia. Now, however, Glance has pivoted in an effort to become a more comprehensive AI-powered commerce platform that operates across lock screens, mobile apps, and TV screens. With Glance today, a user can upload a selfie and, with the help of generative AI, try on products from various brands, and then buy directly from within that experience.
“We are a company that’s moving dramatically to the agentic side. If anything, we’re trying to disintermediate our traditional business, which was not built on agentic,” said Kunal Nagpal, the chief business officer at InMobi Advertising and Glance. In Nagpal’s view, the advent of agentic media planning and trading could squeeze the traditional programmatic stack. If agents can negotiate directly with other agents and shorten negotiation, execution, and campaign optimization timelines, demand- and supply-side platforms, at least in theory, lose value.
Glance inventory in particular shouldn’t be bought through traditional programmatic pipes, because it’s context-dependent, and more like a premium commerce experience than commoditized digital inventory. Instead, InMobi and Scope3 posit, agent-to-agent workflows, which eschew auctions handled by DSPs and SSPs, are better suited for representing this kind of inventory and negotiating its value with buyers.
“Brands have historically had to access premium Glance inventory directly, as open RTB [real-time bidding] infrastructure was never designed to hold the kind of nuance required to properly express its value to advertisers,” Anne Coghlan, COO and cofounder of Scope3, told ADWEEK in a statement. Agentic transactions, she said, “allows it to be bought with the full context of what Glance is, rather than flattening it into a biddable, impression-level commodity.”
The system is built using Ad Context Protocol, or AdCP, an open standard for agentic advertising transactions established by a coalition of industry players including Yahoo and PubMatic—and spearheaded largely by Scope3 CEO and cofounder Brian O’Kelley.
In these kinds of transactions, the degree to which agentic media transactions are automated is dependent on the unique needs of the operators on both the buy and sell sides. Generally speaking, brands will work with their agencies to specify their briefs and goals, and then their buying agents will pinpoint viable media opportunities according to those parameters. Those opportunities are then greenlit (often with humans in the loop), and then sell-side agents can handle campaign setup and execution within the relevant publisher’s environment. Additional pieces of the campaign lifecycle, including audience matching and optimization, may also be automated to various degrees.
