Agentic Ads Dominate Advertising Week as Social Spend Surges

Two conferences, one shared worry

The first full week of October gave the ad industry two stages at the same time. Advertising Week New York ran October 5–8 in Manhattan's Penn District, and the first Jupiter Festival opened at the Miami Beach Convention Center the same week.4 The two events felt very different. The concerns raised at both were close to identical: AI agents that buy media, AI answer engines that pull traffic away from publishers, and an open web whose economics look weaker every quarter.1

The money tells a less anxious story. Budgets keep moving toward social platforms and creators, and the companies that already collect most of that money used both conferences to show off tools meant to take even more of it. My reading of the week is that the anxiety was real but unevenly shared. The walled gardens and the creator economy came in confident. Independent ad tech and open-web publishers came in nervous.

The platforms set the agenda

The biggest announcements were about agents. TikTok said it is bringing its off-platform advertising reach to the U.S. and launched an AI shopping agent that can complete purchases from brands on a user's behalf. Meta said it is testing an assistant that can plan campaigns, adjust targeting and budgets, and remember past work.1 Meta's Advertising Week presentation added more detail. Its business assistant will be able to generate creative and change budgets from conversational prompts. The company is also testing scheduled performance reports, widening access to its Ads Creative Studio, and expanding its Ads MCP server so advertisers can run campaigns from third-party AI tools.37

Meta is also pushing commerce into conversations. It is working with Shopify on direct checkout through Meta Business Agent on Messenger, and it is testing checkout inside Meta AI with Adyen, PayPal, Shopify and Stripe.37 OpenAI took a different angle. It announced a pilot of brand suitability controls with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, which gives advertisers an independent check on how ChatGPT's ad safeguards work. It is also testing a larger, image-led ad format.9

These launches have one thing in common. Each lets a platform own more of the process, from discovery to purchase, inside its own environment. That makes the agentic pitch a bid for more control as well as a convenience feature.

Is agentic buying real yet? It depends who you ask

This is where the coverage disagrees most. Adweek's reporting from Miami called agentic media buying real but not yet at scale. One ad tech executive said their platform takes agent-driven buys through an MCP plug-in, but few requests actually come through that channel.1 Ad Age's summary of Advertising Week said organizers meant to talk less about AI this year, while agentic buying still drew heavy debate over how much control software should have.31 Industry analyst Joe Zappa said on social media that the event signage suggested "agentic advertising" had replaced "outcomes" as the buzzword.1

Other reporting describes adoption that is already under way. Cynopsis profiled InterMedia, an independent agency that buys connected TV. It now runs most of its biddable campaigns through agentic workflows connected to Vibe.co and Olyzon.35 Vibe's CEO said more than 1,000 brands use its MCP integration and that MCP-enabled buying makes up a large share of spend on the platform, much of it from small businesses with limited staff.35 Even InterMedia keeps a person approving changes before they go live.35

Both accounts can be true. Agentic buying appears to be taking hold first in self-serve, performance-driven channels such as CTV for smaller advertisers, where cutting manual work pays off fastest. It is moving more slowly in the premium, negotiated deals that big-brand budgets go through. The structural effects are already being discussed. Adweek reported that demand-side platforms face an existential question if an agent can find and buy suitable inventory without them, while supply-side platforms are recasting themselves as curators of inventory.1 The agentic standards effort reflects the same momentum: AgenticAdvertising.org, which publishes the Ad Context Protocol, now lists more than 150 members, including Yahoo and PubMatic.10

Social and creators get the money

The spending forecasts back up the platforms' confidence. WARC's latest global forecast has total ad spend rising 11.9% to $1.34 trillion in 2026. Social media is the fastest-growing channel, up 21.3% to $394.6 billion, and WARC expects it to pass $500 billion by 2028.30 In the U.S., the IAB raised its 2026 ad spend growth forecast to 12.3%, up from 9.5% in January. Its September update projects 16.5% growth for social, ahead of connected TV.2319

The forecasts disagree on size, mostly because they define the market differently. Statista projects worldwide social ad spend of $338.75 billion this year.21 Other research firms put it far lower, in the low-to-mid $200 billions or below.2628 All of them agree on direction: social is growing faster than the overall ad market.

Meta shows the trend most clearly. It reported first-quarter 2026 ad revenue of $55.02 billion, up 33% year over year.12 One forecast has Meta passing Google in worldwide ad revenue this year for the first time.25

Creator spending is growing faster still, though the headline numbers measure different things. The IAB counts U.S. creator ad spend at $37 billion in 2025, up 26%, and projects $44 billion in 2026.1420 eMarketer's narrower measure of U.S. influencer marketing spend is $12.17 billion this year, up 15.7%, rising to about $13.7 billion in 2027.1215 The gap between those numbers comes from definitions, not disagreement. The broader figure covers paid amplification and creator-led advertising in general, while the narrower one tracks sponsored influencer deals. Either way, creators are now a standard line in media plans rather than an experiment. Marketers now put a median 26% of their social budgets into creator spend, up from 18% in 2024.12

Advertising Week leaned into this. Creator Dhar Mann opened the show with a $100 million Creator Challenge.5 Digiday's preview pointed out that creators now pitch brands directly, without an agency involved.33 Dealmaking followed the same pattern: social agency Samy bought U.S. social and influencer shop Get Engaged in a deal valued in the "low nine figures."1

Measurement remains the problem. One insider asked Adweek how a 20-minute YouTube integration should be valued against a 30-second Super Bowl spot.1 Half of marketing leaders say measuring influencer ROI or ROAS accurately is their biggest challenge.18 Brands seem willing to keep increasing creator budgets without good measurement, and that shows how strongly they want to be where audiences are spending time.

The open web's bad week

The open web had no comparable good news. Adweek reported a consensus in Miami that AI systems are absorbing publisher traffic. Executives said off-platform ad extensions and subscriptions matter more as a result, and advertisers are asking harder questions about why they should spend outside the walled gardens.1 Executives also argued that the funnel is breaking down and clicks matter less than being recommended in AI answers.1

Consumer data backs that up. Adweek cited figures showing that for follow-up searches, Google Search drops to 19%, behind Google Maps at 24% and social media at 22%. About three-quarters of consumers used more than one channel.1

One bankruptcy made the trend concrete. The week before the conferences, OpenWeb entered insolvency proceedings. The company built comment and community tools for publishers and was valued at $1.5 billion in 2022. Filings cited in reporting show about $57.6 million in liabilities, and its lender alleges that 2025 revenue of roughly $121.5 million fell far short of forecast. OpenWeb disputes the lender's account.8 One company's collapse does not prove the whole sector is failing. Still, a business built on helping publishers keep audiences away from social platforms failing in this market is a bad sign.

The fragmentation is helping some formats. Physical and guaranteed-attention placements such as out-of-home, in-game and pre-theatrical ads are in demand, and digital out-of-home stands out.1 WARC forecasts digital OOH spend rising 13.7% to $21.7 billion this year.30

What the week tells us

Jupiter's first year shows how crowded the conference circuit has become. Organizers counted 2,231 attendees and said that met their goal, but parts of the show felt sparse.4 The bigger takeaway concerns the industry, not the events. Ad budgets are growing quickly, and the growth is concentrated. Social platforms and creators are taking a larger share each year, and those same platforms are building agents meant to handle buying, creative and checkout themselves.

For independent ad tech and open-web publishers, the risk goes beyond losing share. If agents start making media decisions, the companies that control the agents and the data they draw on will decide where budgets go. This week's announcements show the largest platforms intend to be those companies, and most of the industry's forecasts point the same way.