News Corp-owned U.K. tabloid The Sun is building an AI agent for its programmatic business

“This is coming,” Carter said onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Monday (Oct. 27). Though light on details, Carter said The Sun is “watching and building and making sure that we’re ready… It’s going to be down to client adoption. And we just have to be able to play in that space… You have to be able to work wherever the money is.”

Carter’s proclamation comes just weeks after the debut of Ad Context Protocol (or AdCP) — an open-source standard that gives AI agents a common language to transact across advertisers, publishers, and ad tech — and the launch of WPP’s Open Pro, the ad agency’s agentic AI marketing platform.

Ad tech firms like Scope3 — using AdCP — will “ask the publishers to give them the audience that they’re looking for, which means that we have to really think about us having an AI agent that talks with their AI agent… We’ve got to build that pretty quickly [because] someone’s now talking about it… If the DSPs are starting to change, we have to reflect that; otherwise you become less valuable,” Carter said in a previous conversation.

The Sun isn’t alone in its plans to test in-house models. Other large publishers are aiming to experiment and are looking for demand-side partners to test. Using agents for other tasks related to running media — like RFP interpretation, audience and campaign optimization and reporting are already well underway at a number of publishers, via platforms like Permutive.

Some publishers are enticed by the notion that agentic media buying can potentially provide a clearer path of supply between publishers and advertisers, cutting out unnecessary ad tech middlemen.

That’s less of an enticing promise for The Sun, which has done a lot of the hard work to whittle down the volume of ad tech vendors in its digital ad supply chain.

“We’ve reduced our ads.txt files by 86% in the last 18 months. We’ve limited that. We work with our partners like Ozone. We have direct integrations with them, with The Trade Desk,” said Carter. 

Meanwhile, The Sun is also using AI to boost its fledgling subscriptions business, launched in February. The publisher is using AI to personalize the customer journey — showing different offers and content to readers based on how they got to the site and what content they’re consuming, per Carter, though he declined to reveal its paid subscriber count.

Carter said the company is moving from a large-scale page views-based business to one that’s focused on engagement and attention metrics, though this shift is happening “not through choice, but for the factors that have affected the publishing industry and the lack of referral traffic, your [page views] go down.”

Publishers are suffering from declining referral traffic as a result of Google search volatility, and the introduction of AI summaries that mean less click-throughs to publishers’ sites.