PubMatic Is Betting AI Agents Will Finally Fix Programmatic’s Complexity Problem

Turning prompts into media plans

Untapped Growth is positioning the partnership as a way to compress the traditional media buying workflow into a single interaction.

“We have partnered with PubMatic to build our own buyer agent. We enable our agencies to tap into this agent to buying agentically,” said Brendan Clifford, co-founder and managing partner at Untapped Growth.

Clifford added that its indie agencies can input a media plan into an LLM—such as Claude—and execute transactions directly with supply-side platforms bypassing traditional DSP layers. In doing so, the agents help cut down on the “tech tax and the operating tax” of going through a DSP.

“Traditional buying approach for indies, where they are taking a brief from a client, and put together a plan, contracting with an SSP and a DSP, and all of that that has been condensed into one very efficient LLM prompt, reducing the time to market of that solution and ensuring the best possible cost efficiency to the highest premium inventory,” Clifford said.

The broader ambition is to give smaller agencies access to capabilities typically reserved for larger holding companies without requiring them to spend more.

“What this partnership with PubMatic helps us do is add the capacity and the capability to indies so that they can increase their speed to market, their flexibility and their transparency in how they tap into premium inventory in the programmatic space,” Clifford added.