Arizona Tribune - Stagwell (STGW) Becomes First Partner to Adopt The Trade Desk's Koa Agents, Bringing AI-Driven Advertising to Scale

NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / April 21, 2026 / Stagwell (NASDAQ:STGW) and The Trade Desk today announced the expansion of their global partnership, with Stagwell becoming the first global marketing network to adopt Koa Agents, The Trade Desk's new alpha agentic AI capabilities for media planning, buying, optimization, and measurement across the open internet.

Koa Agents introduce a simpler way to run advertising: instead of manually configuring campaigns step-by-step, marketers can describe their goals and direct AI-powered agents execute, optimize, and continuously improve campaigns in real time with visibility and control. Tasks that once required days of setup and analysis now happen automatically and adapt as conditions change, enabling faster decisions and stronger performance.

As part of this first to market partnership, Stagwell will connect the AI capabilities within Stagwell Media Platform with Koa Agents through Open Agentic Kit, The Trade Desk's agentic integration framework. Through integration with Open Agentic Kit, StagwellMedia Platform and The Trade Desk bring their agentic capabilities together to create a unified system that powers custom, automated workflows seamlessly connecting planning, activation, measurement, and optimization.

Automatically Move From Strategy to Execution

The plan for the first phase of alpha deployment is to integrate Koa Agents into Stagwell workflows to automate key stages of campaign planning and activation:

Audience planning and activation: Traders describe the audience they want to reach, and Koa Agents handle the rest: helping identify high-value consumers, building and prioritizing segments using Stagwell's agentic targeting system, activating them across premium inventory and continuously improving performance in real time.

Transparency and control: Koa Agents help identify and prioritize premium inventory using transparent, objective quality signals, including Sincera's ads to content ratio and ad refresh rate. Stagwell will leverage data from The Trade Desk to support deeper pricing transparency across the whole inventory supply chain. Combined with Stagwell Curate, this enables Stagwell to create bespoke inventory packages that improve both brand impact and conversion outcomes and see in-flight margin within live campaigns.

Stagwell will also be among the first to adopt The Trade Desk's conversational user experience, enabling traders to ask why campaigns are under-pacing or performing, identify drivers of results, and receive clear, actionable recommendations instantly.

Stagwell expects to make these Koa Agent capabilities available to select clients in closed beta later this summer.

Innovation Agenda: End-to-End Campaign Intelligence

Beyond initial capabilities, Stagwell intends to collaborate with The Trade Desk on its broader agentic roadmap, which will extend agentic capabilities across the full campaign lifecycle. This will include automated campaign setup, real-time troubleshooting and optimization, and proactive insights and performance recommendations.

This partnership expansion builds years of collaboration, including Stagwell's adoption of Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), a privacy-conscious, open identity framework. Combined with Koa Agents, UID2 enables more accurate audience definition, seamless cross-channel activation, and clearer measurement to connect strategy directly to execution and outcomes.

Executive Perspectives

"Advertising is becoming more complex-but how we interact with it should become simpler," said Aravind Chandrasekharan, SVP of Engineering. "Koa Agents allow marketers to focus on outcomes while the system handles execution with precision and visibility. Our partnership with Stagwell reflects a shared commitment to open, interoperable technology that gives advertisers more control."

"Koa Agents represent a meaningful step forward for our clients," said Slavi Samardzija, Global Chair of Media & Commerce, Stagwell. "By combining The Trade Desk's AI capabilities with our data, identity infrastructure and Stagwell Media Platform, we can make advanced advertising more accessible, strategic, and effective."

About Stagwell

Stagwell is the global challenger network transforming marketing through AI. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world's most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing. Led by entrepreneurs, our specialists in 45+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for our clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com.

About The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk^™ is a technology company that empowers buyers of advertising. Through its self-service, cloud-based platform, ad buyers can create, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across ad formats and devices. Integrations with major data, inventory, and publisher partners ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities, and enterprise APIs enable custom development on top of the platform. Headquartered in Ventura, CA, The Trade Desk has offices across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. To learn more, visit thetradedesk.com or follow us on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Media Contacts

Quinn Werner
[email protected]

Pat Wentling
[email protected]

SOURCE: Stagwell

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

G.P.Martin--AT