Stagwell Becomes First Marketing Network to Adopt The Trade Desk's Koa Agents for Automated Media Buying

Stagwell (Nasdaq: STGW) announced on April 21 that it will become the first global marketing network to adopt Koa Agents, The Trade Desk’s agentic AI capabilities for media planning, buying, optimization, and measurement across the open internet, according to Newswire.

How Koa Agents Work

Instead of manually configuring campaigns step by step, marketers describe their goals and Koa Agents execute, optimize, and continuously improve campaigns in real time. Tasks that previously required days of setup and analysis now happen automatically and adapt as conditions change, per the press release.

Stagwell will connect its Media Platform to Koa Agents through Open Agentic Kit, The Trade Desk’s agentic integration framework, creating a unified system for planning, activation, measurement, and optimization.

First Phase Capabilities

The initial alpha deployment covers two areas, per Newswire:

• Audience planning and activation: Traders describe the audience they want to reach. Koa Agents identify high-value consumers, build and prioritize segments using Stagwell’s targeting system, activate across premium inventory, and continuously improve performance in real time.
• Transparency and control: Agents identify and prioritize premium inventory using transparent quality signals from Sincera (ads-to-content ratio, ad refresh rate). Stagwell will leverage Trade Desk data for pricing transparency across the inventory supply chain.

Stagwell will also adopt The Trade Desk’s conversational interface, enabling traders to ask why campaigns are under-pacing, identify result drivers, and receive actionable recommendations instantly.

Select clients will get access in closed beta later this summer.

Beyond Initial Rollout

The broader roadmap extends agentic capabilities across the full campaign lifecycle: automated campaign setup, real-time troubleshooting, and proactive insights. The partnership builds on Stagwell’s prior adoption of Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) for privacy-conscious, cross-channel identity resolution.

“Koa Agents allow marketers to focus on outcomes while the system handles execution with precision and visibility,” said Aravind Chandrasekharan, SVP of Engineering at The Trade Desk, in the announcement.

Ad Tech Joins the Agent Wave

Media buying has been one of the last major enterprise workflows to resist full automation. Campaign setup, audience segmentation, bid optimization, and creative performance analysis still rely heavily on human traders working through manual interfaces. Stagwell’s adoption of Koa Agents signals that the ad tech industry is moving from AI-assisted tools to AI-driven execution, following the pattern already visible in software engineering, customer service, and financial operations.