There's a phrase doing the rounds in the advertising world this week that you'll be hearing a lot more of: agentic advertising. It flooded the Cannes Lions festival — the industry's big annual gathering — and Amazon used the moment to plant a flag with its Alexa assistant. If you sell products online, this is one of those moments where the ground shifts a little under your feet, so let me walk you through what's actually going on and why it matters to you.

What On Earth Is "Agentic Advertising"?

Let me translate the jargon. An "agent" in this context is an AI assistant that does things on your customer's behalf — not just answering questions, but actually going off and completing tasks. Think of someone telling Alexa "order me more dog food" and the assistant choosing the product, the brand, and pressing buy. No browsing. No scrolling through your product page. No seeing your carefully written description or your lovely photography.

That's the shift. For twenty years, paid search has been about getting a human to click your ad and land on your site. The whole game — ad copy, product feeds, landing pages — assumes a person is on the other end making a decision. Agentic advertising asks a genuinely unsettling question: what happens when the thing doing the shopping isn't a person at all, but a machine acting for them?

As agentic advertising floods Cannes, Amazon touts its Alexa advantage was the headline, and Amazon's pitch is simple — they have hundreds of millions of Alexa devices sitting in people's kitchens, so they reckon they're best placed to own this new shopping front door.

Why This Should Be On Your Radar

Here's the practical worry for an online store owner. If an AI agent is choosing products for your customer, how does it decide what to put in the basket? It's not looking at your brand the way a human does. It's reading structured data — your product titles, your attributes, your prices, your reviews, your feed.

That means the quality of your product feed stops being a behind-the-scenes technical detail and becomes the whole shop window. If your feed has vague titles, missing attributes, or thin descriptions, a human might forgive you and buy anyway because they liked your photos. An agent won't. It'll simply pick the product whose data is clearest and most complete.

So the thing I've been saying for years — that a clean, rich, well-structured product feed is the foundation of good Shopping performance — just got considerably more important. The feed is no longer something you tidy up for Google's benefit. It may soon be the only thing a robot shopper ever "sees".

I'm watching this rollout closely, because nobody quite knows yet how these agent purchases will be measured, attributed, or even paid for. But the direction of travel is clear, and getting your data house in order now is the smart move.

Measuring Success When Everything's Connected

The second story this week speaks to a problem that predates all this AI excitement but gets worse because of it: how do you actually measure whether your advertising is working when customers move across so many platforms?

How Do I Effectively Measure Campaign Success Across Multiple Platforms? tackled exactly this. A customer might see your product on Instagram, search for it on Google a day later, then finally buy after an email lands in their inbox. Which channel gets the credit? If you ask each platform individually, they'll all claim the sale — and suddenly your reports say you've made three times the revenue you actually have.

This matters for a simple reason: you can't optimise what you can't measure properly. If you're pouring budget into a channel because its own dashboard says it's a hero, but it's actually just taking credit for sales that other channels did the hard work on, you're flying blind.

The industry's answer is moving towards looking at the whole picture — blended performance across everything you spend, measured against your actual total revenue, rather than trusting any single platform's self-reported numbers. It's less flattering, but it's honest. And in a world where AI agents are about to add yet another murky touchpoint to the customer journey, having an honest measurement framework matters more than ever.

A Word on Brand Honesty

The third story this week was a lighter one — The Honest Company's campaign delivering some plain-speaking truths about women's bathroom realities — but there's a thread worth pulling. It worked because it was direct, real, and didn't dress things up.

That's not a bad principle to carry into the agentic era. As AI starts mediating more of how people discover and buy products, the brands that win will be the ones whose value is genuinely clear — clear in their messaging, clear in their data, clear in what they actually offer. There's nowhere to hide vague positioning when a machine is doing the comparing.

What I'd Do About It This Week

So where does this leave you? Not panicking — agentic shopping isn't going to replace your customers overnight. But here's what I think matters:

  • Get your product feed pristine. Rich titles, complete attributes, accurate prices, proper descriptions. This is the foundation for both today's Shopping campaigns and tomorrow's robot shoppers.
  • Stop trusting single-platform reporting blindly. Look at your blended numbers — total ad spend against total revenue — to see what's really working.
  • Keep your brand message sharp and honest. Clarity wins when there's a machine in the middle doing the choosing.

The big takeaway from this week is that the front door to your shop is starting to change. For two decades it's been a person typing a search and clicking through. Increasingly, it may be an assistant in someone's kitchen making the call for them. That's not something to fear — but it is something to prepare for, and the preparation starts with the unglamorous, essential work of getting your data right.

I'll be keeping a close eye on how Amazon, Google and the rest play this out, and I'll keep you posted as it becomes clearer what it means in practice. As ever, if you want to talk through what any of this means for your specific store, you know where I am.