The new Signal & Noise featured article by Rio Longacre is now available online: Agentic Trading: A New Stack or a New Set of Intermediaries?

Agentic trading promises to automate how advertising is discovered, negotiated, executed and settled, but building it will require an entirely new transaction stack. The industry may believe it is choosing software, when in fact it may be choosing its next set of intermediaries.

Agentic trading is moving from theory to reality, with buyer and seller agents already discovering inventory, negotiating deals, and executing media transactions in minutes instead of weeks. But as Rio Longacre explores in this article, the bigger question isn’t whether agents can transact—it’s what kind of advertising ecosystem gets built around them.

The opportunity is especially compelling for direct and negotiated media, where agents can eliminate enormous amounts of manual work across planning, pricing, IOs, trafficking, and optimization. But identity, measurement, verification, settlement, governance, and human oversight still have to exist somewhere. That creates a risk that instead of eliminating AdTech middlemen, agentic trading simply creates a new generation of them. The winners may ultimately be the companies that control the protocols, discovery layers, integrations, and infrastructure connecting buyers and publishers. The real battle isn’t just over automation—it’s over who controls the new stack.

With Kurt Donnell from Freestar

The open web has survived the rise of search, social media, programmatic advertising, privacy regulation, and the walled gardens. But does generative AI represent a fundamentally different kind of threat. In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre sits down one-on-one with Kurt Donnell, President & CEO of Freestar, while Brett House is away for the week.

Kurt brings an unusual perspective to the conversation: he began his career as an M&A attorney, moved into digital media and operations, helped take YogaWorks public, and eventually joined Freestar as its first CEO. Under his leadership, Freestar says it has grown sevenfold in revenue, expanded to roughly 185 employees across 15 countries, and returned more than $1 billion to publisher partners.

Rio and Kurt dig into a question that has become increasingly urgent for digital media: Is the publisher crisis still primarily a monetization problem—or has AI created a structural break in the economics of the open web?