Swivel Bets on Agentic Infrastructure for CTV Ad Sales

By Amara Osei

Swivel wants agents to run the entire CTV campaign chain, from media planning to post-campaign reporting — and its co-founder claims the startup is now "much more active at the front end of the agentic workflow."

The publisher-side ad tech startup was founded by former FreeWheeler Frans Vermeulen and SpringServe co-founders Matt Dearborn, Rich Lin and Joseph Hirsch. Its stated aim is to automate manual tasks in publisher ad operations, from campaign optimization to pricing adjustments. Hirsch told Streamlined the company wants to be an "end-to-end system" of agents covering all aspects of campaign management, with the eventual goal of an agentic infrastructure spanning the CTV advertising chain and embedded in media sellers' yield optimization (the practice of maximizing revenue per impression).

How does Swivel's agentic system actually work?

Swivel does not sell one consolidated product. It deploys multiple agents, each responsible for part of a campaign buy — budgeting, bid trafficking, pacing, yield management and post-campaign reporting, Hirsch said.

The company's focus has shifted. Initially it was "very active in the middle to tail end of the agentic media workflow," especially yield optimization, Hirsch said. Now it works upstream, on what happens before any media is purchased: planning, forecasting and ad ops rule-setting for guaranteed deals.

Publishers, however, are not handing over the keys. Many clients adopt only one or two agents, "so as not to disrupt their entire ad ops workflow," Hirsch said. Cherry-picking what to outsource is common — a caveat worth attaching to any claim that agentic adoption is inevitable. Hirsch himself conceded there is no cakewalk in building agentic solutions for every step of the CTV chain or in winning wide adoption.

What about fragmentation?

Agentic automation is not automatically simplification. With every vendor evolving into an AI solution, CTV buyers and sellers risk facing too many agents in the kitchen — and agentic platforms and MCPs (model context protocols, standards letting AI systems exchange data) could become another tangle in CTV's existing fragmentation.

Hirsch pointed to the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), a set of standardized protocols that lets online ad supply chain agents communicate and negotiate. AdCP includes a specification called adagents.json, which lets publishers declare which agents are authorized to sell their inventory — not unlike sellers.json. Notably, AdCP is collaborative with Prebid and somewhat opposed to the IAB Tech Lab's AAMP and ARTF frameworks. Two competing standardization camps, one unresolved question.

The takeaway: standards exist, but which one the industry rallies behind remains open.

Why agentic beats programmatic for some CTV formats

The case for agentic CTV rests on formats programmatic cannot easily handle. Non-standard placements — sponsorship inventory, home screen ads, pause ads — vary across streaming apps, smart TV models and buying channels. Without publisher-side standardization, these buys are difficult to set up programmatically, Hirsch said.

Vendors and industry orgs have recently announced standardized integrations for home screen and pause ads, but wider buy-in takes time. Agentic buying can automate ad sales for formats that are hard or impossible to buy programmatically, Hirsch said. Sequential media — creatives appearing in a set order within a program — is another strategy manageable agentically but not programmatically.

The takeaway: agents fill gaps programmatic left behind, which is a real incentive, not just hype.

What comes next?

Today, "our focus is still 100% CTV," Hirsch said. But Swivel intends to expand into retail media, which he called especially promising because of the rising overlap between retail media and CTV — citing Walmart, Vizio and Vibe.co as evidence. If that convergence keeps accelerating, Swivel's agentic infrastructure could scale beyond streaming screens; whether publishers will trust it end to end is the harder test.