AdTech Platforms Publishers Inside Agentic Advertising: Publishers, Platforms & Payments Agentic advertising has quickly become one of the most talked about topics in AdTech. AI agents buying and selling media on behalf of advertisers and publishers promises a more automated, efficient, and intelligent ecosystem. But beyond the headlines, where are we actually today? In Episode 2 of the Revving PubCast, our co-founders Chris Pettit and David Mandeno sat down with Andrew Mole, CEO of pubX. pubX connects publishers and advertisers through a transparent, data-driven marketplace built on five years of publisher-side trust and data. Its agentic technology operates across every auction in real time, helping drive better yields for publishers and stronger performance for advertisers. Together, they explored what agentic advertising really means in practice, where adoption stands today, and why the conversation extends far beyond media buying alone. Beyond the Hype Much of the discussion focused on separating genuine progress from industry excitement. While agentic advertising has become a major talking point, Andrew explained that adoption is still in its early stages. The technology is real, but the industry is moving through the work of testing, learning and proving where AI agents can create genuine value. Rather than replacing people, the opportunity lies in allowing software agents to manage the operational complexity that humans simply can’t optimise at scale. “It solves the human capital problem. Humans are limited by scale […] Agentic gives us the opportunity to get the best job done, not just get the job done.” Andrew Mole, CEO, pubX Putting Publishers Back at the Centre One of the strongest themes throughout the discussion was the role of publishers. Programmatic advertising has created extraordinary scale, but that scale hasn’t always translated into better outcomes for the publishers creating the inventory and audiences advertisers want to reach. Andrew argues that agentic advertising offers an opportunity to rebalance that relationship. By helping publishers surface the right audiences, package value more precisely, and transact more efficiently, agentic systems could give publishers greater control over how their inventory is valued and sold. As the conversation explores, the winners won’t simply be the platforms with the most automation, but the businesses that create the most value for the ecosystem. Simplifying a Complex Ecosystem Another theme that surfaced was operational complexity. AdTech has become dense with manual workflows, fragmented systems, and intermediaries built to solve specific problems. Over time, that has made the ecosystem harder to navigate for everyone involved. Rather than adding another layer, Andrew sees agentic advertising as a chance to simplify how work actually gets done. Routine tasks that consume traders, sales teams and AdOps functions today could increasingly be handled by agents, freeing people to focus on higher-value decisions, relationships and strategy. “AdTech has spent 15 years trying to fix the problems that AdTech has created [ …] Agentic gives us the opportunity to rewrite the strategic problems of the industry.” Andrew Mole, CEO, pubX Payments Can’t Stay Outside the Workflow While AI is transforming how media is bought and sold, Andrew, David and Chris highlighted another challenge sitting underneath the industry: payments. Campaigns may eventually become increasingly autonomous, but payment infrastructure still relies on processes and settlement cycles that were designed for a very different era. As David explains during the conversation: “Payment terms should be a choice that either participant of the transaction can choose into, rather than that being dictated.” David Mandeno, COO, Revving The discussion explores how financial infrastructure could evolve alongside agentic workflows, giving businesses greater flexibility over when revenue moves through the ecosystem rather than treating payment timing as a fixed constraint. Building What Comes Next The episode closes on a clear point. Agentic advertising isn’t just another optimisation layer; if it takes hold, it changes how media is transacted, how value is created, and how the infrastructure around those transactions needs to operate. As Andrew puts it: “I do think agentic is inevitable. I do think this is the way media is transacted, and I think in three years from now it’s going to be normalised.” Andrew Mole, CEO, pubX For publishers, there is immense opportunity to regain more control over how inventory is valued, how audiences are activated, and how value flows back through the ecosystem. That is what makes this conversation bigger than automation. It’s about what the next generation of advertising infrastructure could unlock, and who it’s ultimately built to serve. Watch the full episode above to hear the discussion in full. Learn more about pubX: https://pubx.ai/
News PubCast: How We’re Funding The Future Of The Digital Economy The Digital Economy moves in Real Time – Cash Flow Doesn’t The digital economy moves at machine speed. Campaigns launch instantly; inventory clears in milliseconds; performance data updates continuously. But when it comes to cash, the industry still runs on delay. In a recent Revving PubCast, our Co-Founders Chris Pettit and David Mandeno sat down with Tom Triscari, Founder of the Advertising Economics Forum and author of Quo Vadis, to unpack one of the least discussed constraints in the digital economy: payment timing. Across adtech and the wider digital economy, capital flows don’t reflect how value is actually created. Revenue is generated in real time, but cash arrives weeks – sometimes months – later. The result is a system where growth is routinely self-financed by intermediaries who were never meant to play that role. When Finance Lags the Digital Economy The issue isn’t a lack of revenue. It’s a mismatch between modern transaction models and legacy financial infrastructure. Chris and David discussed how this gap shows up across the ecosystem. Platforms get paid early. Brands settle late. Agencies, DSPs, SSPs, and publishers absorb the timing risk in between, often stretching their balance sheets to keep momentum going. This isn’t a temporary inefficiency. It’s a structural one. Despite the abundance of real-time data, most funding decisions still rely on static documents, delayed reconciliation, and assumptions that don’t reflect how digital businesses actually operate. Transactional-Based Funding: a Model Built for the Digital Economy Revving exists because traditional funding models no longer fit the way the digital economy operates. Transactional-Based Funding (TBF) is the liquidity model Revving pioneered to reflect how the digital economy actually operates. In the PubCast, Chris and David referenced TBF as the foundation Revving has been built on from day one – enabling capital to be accessed continuously, adjusted as volume changes, and used without introducing friction into commercial relationships or reshaping the balance sheet. Rather than anchoring access to capital to invoices, delayed reconciliation, or historic balance sheets, TBF uses real-time transaction data to unlock earned revenue as it’s generated. By underwriting against live activity and payer quality, funding moves in line with performance instead of lagging behind it. “We’re taking invoice factoring, which is a tried and tested funding model historically used in supply chain finance and import-export, and dragging it into the 21st century and innovating on it so that it’s appropriate for the digital economy.” David Mandeno, COO & Co-Founder, Revving The result is a financing model designed for transaction-driven businesses: adaptive rather than reactive, and aligned with how digital revenue is actually earned. RevHub: The Interface for Transactional-Based Funding During the conversation, Chris and David touched on a less visible but equally persistent issue: financial visibility. Access to capital helps, but finance teams are still left managing fragmented receivables, inconsistent payment behavior, and manual reconciliation across dozens of counterparties. Even answering a basic question: ‘where is our cash actually sitting?’ can take time. They pointed to our customer portal RevHub as the layer that makes Transactional-Based Funding practical in day-to-day operations. RevHub gives teams a real-time view of earned revenue, available funding, advances, and collections, all in one interface. Rather than relying on delayed reports and manual workflows, finance teams get immediate clarity and control. In the context of the conversation, RevHub came up not as simply a feature, but as the connective tissue that allows Transactional-Based Funding to operate at the speed of the digital economy. Reducing Financial Drag One theme that surfaced repeatedly in the conversation was operational overhead. Fragmented receivables, inconsistent payment behavior, and manual reconciliation quietly consume finance teams’ time. That drag compounds as businesses scale. Alongside funding, Revving was designed to simplify this layer, consolidating transaction visibility, receivables tracking, and payment performance into a single system. And as our dataset grows, so does the accuracy of our models, which allows pricing and access to improve over time. “It becomes a self-fulfilling circle: the more people that embrace this and work with us […] means more data, it means more transparency, it means more visibility, it means better pricing, it means everyone wins.” Chris Pettit, CEO & Co-Founder, Revving Building the Financial Layer the Industry Has Been Missing The PubCast closed on where this all leads. With significant funding capacity behind us and continued expansion in the U.S., our focus is on building infrastructure that matches the reality of digital commerce – one that scales without forcing companies to trade flexibility for growth. The ambition isn’t simply to fund faster. It’s to create a smarter, more automated credit layer that works quietly in the background to support the entire ecosystem. Want to hear the story in their own words? Listen to the full PubCast episode above.
