Stagwell's Media Machine Puts Agentic Buying Into an Open Platform as the Holding Company AI Race Intensifies

Stagwell this week launched The Media Machine, an extension of its broader AI platform (The Machine) designed specifically for media planning and buying. The announcement comes during Cannes Lions, where the holding company competitive dynamics around AI-native media infrastructure are on full display.

The Media Machine integrates directly with Google’s GMP, Meta, Microsoft/LinkedIn, TikTok, and The Trade Desk, enabling agentic buying execution across these platforms within a single workflow. The system includes unified planning and activation, an ID-graph-driven audience-first approach that carries through from brief to activation, and market mix modeling designed to run faster than traditional MMM cycles. The architecture is deliberately open, integrating with Figma, Slack, Teams, Adobe, and performance dashboards rather than locking into a proprietary closed stack.

Slavi Samardzija, who joined Stagwell as global chair of media and commerce in 2025 from an 11-year tenure at Omnicom, led the announcement. Brad Nunn, managing director of media at Stagwell agency Gale, initiated the technical build. Multiple clients are in alpha testing; Gale and Assembly agencies are leading deployment.

The original insight for media buyers: the open-source design choice is deliberate and consequential. Larger holding companies with legacy infrastructure have an incentive to build closed systems that protect existing technology investments. Stagwell, without that inheritance, is betting on interoperability as a structural advantage. If an agentic buying system can call any DSP and integrate with any workflow tool natively, the holding company layer becomes thinner and potentially more defensible on execution quality rather than platform lock-in. As AI platforms become direct media channels, the ability to route buying decisions fluidly across a wider surface becomes increasingly valuable.

Source: Stagwell