Readiness Advisory
Systems That Decide
Essays About Contact

Agentic media buying · ANZ · Andrew Gilbert

The next three years of media will be bought by machines.

The first live agent-to-agent media transaction cleared in October 2025. Agentic campaigns are running in Australia today. I'm Andrew Gilbert. Sixteen years inside the stack, now independent, with no stake in what you buy next. I show brands, agencies and publishers how to get ready.

Take the 90-second self-assessment Book a 30-minute scoping call

30 minutes · No commitment · One business day to reply

The shift · 02

This is not a forecast. The money is already moving.

An agentic buyer is software that takes a campaign brief, finds the inventory, negotiates the price, and writes down every decision it makes. The human approves the goal. The machine makes the buy.

  1. October 2025

    The first live agent-to-agent media transaction clears.

    LG Ads inventory. Real money. AI agents handled creative, targeting and approval under human oversight. One observer compared it to watching the first banner ad being served.

  2. January 2026

    The platforms go live, and Australia is in the first wave.

    PubMatic launches AgenticOS at CES with more than twenty agents. Yahoo DSP switches on agentic buying in Australia and Singapore from day one, not as a delayed regional rollout.

  3. April 2026

    Agentic campaigns are running end-to-end in Australia.

    PubMatic confirms live end-to-end agentic campaigns in Australian market. The Trade Desk launches Koa Agents in alpha, with Stagwell first to adopt. From governance body to live local campaigns took under six months.

  4. December 2026

    The regulation lands before most stacks are ready.

    Automated decision-making transparency obligations arrive under the Privacy Act. If a machine is making buying decisions with your budget, you will need to be able to say how.

Full autonomy across a diversified media plan is further out. 2027, probably later. But the infrastructure being built now will determine who is positioned when that autonomy arrives, and who is not. That is the three-year window, and it is open now.

Where you sit · 03

The question is the same in every seat. Are you ready?

01 / Brand

Your agency says it's fine.

PMax and Advantage+ are already making decisions inside your buy that your agency cannot fully audit.

How I work with brands →
02 / Independent Agency

Your clients will ask before you're ready.

Agentic buying compresses the margin model before your clients ask what your position is.

How I work with agencies →
03 / Publisher

You're not losing deals. You're being skipped.

If a machine can't read your inventory, it buys somewhere else. You're excluded before the auction starts.

How I work with publishers →

The mandate

"The analysis is the product. I am not incentivised by what you buy next, but by how well you understand what you already have."
How independence is enforced →

Why me · 04

Sixteen years inside the stack. Now outside it.

Andrew Gilbert

Andrew Gilbert · Founder · Sydney

I spent sixteen years operating inside the systems this site is about. Agency trading desks, ad tech platforms, and most recently Afterpay, where I led the launch of the first payments-native commerce media offering in ANZ.

I now work independently. No reseller margin, no platform partnership, no referral fees from anyone. When I tell you a vendor is the right call, it is because the evidence says so, not because I clip the ticket.

Since launching this practice I have been writing the public record on agentic buying in ANZ: what is live, what is positioning dressed as product, and what it means for the people who have to act on it. The essays are the evidence. Read them before you pay me anything.

04 May 2026 · Strategy · 8 min

Five problems. Five moves.

The five structural problems sitting inside ANZ media stacks right now, and the move each one calls for. Written for operators with the authority to act, not the patience for taxonomy.

Read on Substack →
26 February 2026 · Programmatic · 5 min

The bid request is the unit of power.

If you don't control the bid request, you don't control the auction. If you don't control the auction, you don't control yield. Programmatic strategy is a conversation about who owns this object.

Read on Substack →
05 March 2026 · Agency Model · 6 min

Why the agency contract is structurally unstable.

The agency contract describes a different service to what is delivered. This is structural. The fee model and the production model have drifted apart for fifteen years, and neither side will say so out loud.

Read on Substack →
All essays

Get ready · 05

Leave with a document. Not a quote.

Every engagement starts the same way: the Diagnostic. A scored readiness baseline for your stack, 0 to 24, independent of every vendor with something to sell you. You keep the document. What happens next is your call.

Take the 90-second self-assessment Book a scoping call

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Andrew Gilbert · andrew@systemsthatdecide.io · One business day to reply

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