By Ben Cann, Senior Vice President of Product Management, DoubleVerify
Setting up and executing digital advertising campaigns has never been simple. Advertisers must balance performance, inventory quality, brand suitability, fraud protection and compliance requirements while coordinating decisions across multiple platforms and partners.
The growing use of curated inventory, private marketplace (PMP) and programmatic guaranteed (PG) deals has added another layer of complexity. While these approaches provide greater control, transparency and access to premium inventory, they also require advertisers to ensure that the appropriate protections, targeting criteria and campaign requirements are consistently applied throughout planning, buying and activation workflows.
For Butler/Till, a leading agency serving pharmaceutical, medtech and wellness brands, those challenges are especially important. In healthcare advertising, brand protection is not optional. Advertisers must ensure campaigns appear in appropriate environments while meeting strict compliance requirements.
By combining agentic AI, emerging interoperability standards such as MCP and AdCP, with DV Neura™, DoubleVerify's cognitive engine that powers its platform, Butler/Till has transformed what was once a fragmented, multi-step process into a more connected workflow that brings planning, verification and activation together without compromising on protection or control.
Butler/Till has more than 25 years of experience serving healthcare advertisers, whose brand suitability and compliance needs often demand additional scrutiny.
Historically, translating a campaign brief into the appropriate brand suitability, fraud protection and optimization settings required planners to navigate multiple platforms and rely on expertise that often sat outside the buying workflow itself. A planner might develop a media strategy in one platform, consult verification experts in another, activate through a separate buying environment and then manually ensure that the appropriate protections and controls were carried through to execution. While effective, the process often depended on institutional knowledge, multiple handoffs and manual validation. As campaign complexity increased, Butler/Till sought opportunities to streamline workflows while maintaining the governance and quality standards required by healthcare advertisers.
“Healthcare marketers operate in some of the most complex advertising environments, where every decision must balance performance, compliance, brand suitability and consumer trust,” said Gina Whelehan, Group Director of Strategic Partnerships at Butler/Till. “Bringing verification into the workflow earlier helps our teams move faster while maintaining the governance and accountability required in highly regulated categories.”
Today, Butler/Till is using Claude as its buyer agent to discover, evaluate, select and activate media buys agentically through the AdCP protocol. By connecting Claude to DoubleVerify's Media AdVantage Platform (DV MAP™) via MCP, Butler/Till can feed brand preferences and verification expertise directly into the planning process and layer protection onto the agentic buy. This transforms what was once a fragmented workflow spanning multiple systems into a single guided conversation.
When a campaign brief is loaded, the conversational interface immediately surfaces brand suitability recommendations and insights tailored to both the agency trader and the brands they represent. Recommendations are layered across multiple levels, from Authentic Brand Suitability profiles that reflect a brand's specific preferences to agency-level profiles that capture best practices to off-the-shelf suitability controls aligned to particular industries or topics, such as negative news related to healthcare. This approach reflects DV's flexibility for agencies managing multiple clients and profiles, each with their own suitability requirements, standards and compliance considerations.
Rather than replacing planner judgment, the system acts as a guide. It explains available options, provides context for why they may be relevant and enables planners to make informed decisions while maintaining full control over campaign settings.
The workflow extends beyond brand suitability. Additional protections and performance controls, including fraud and invalid traffic avoidance, viewability thresholds and contextual alignment options, are available as optional add-ons within the same conversation, not a separate workflow. What once required multiple systems, vendor calls and manual cross-checks can now happen within a single Claude session. Early implementations indicate that integrating verification earlier in the workflow can reduce manual validation requirements and improve consistency across campaign execution.
Once planning is complete, the buyer agent communicates its decisions directly to PubMatic's AgenticOS, which applies the selected protections to inventory packages before the auction and executes the campaign only on inventory that meets the selected DV criteria.
This workflow is powered by DV Neura™, DoubleVerify's cognitive engine embedded across the DV Media AdVantage Platform.
DV Neura makes DV's media intelligence, recommendations and protections available directly within AI-driven workflows. In Butler/Till's case, that allows Claude to surface relevant brand suitability, fraud protection and media quality recommendations that flow directly into PubMatic's AgenticOS where the campaign executes on inventory aligned with those protections.
Once a campaign is live, those same workflows can be used to evaluate campaign quality and effectiveness. Teams can review performance, identify potential sources of waste and make informed adjustments without leaving the environment where planning and activation decisions were originally made. For agencies managing highly regulated brands, maintaining this continuity across planning, activation and optimization can help improve operational consistency while preserving necessary oversight.
More broadly, Butler/Till's implementation illustrates DV's vision for the future. The company has spent years building the integrations needed to make verification available across the digital advertising ecosystem. With DV Neura, that foundation now enables something larger: trusted media intelligence that can be accessed by agents anywhere across planning, activation, optimization and measurement workflows.
The result is a more connected, streamlined and completely auditable process from brief to activation. Every decision can be traced back to campaign requirements, creating a clear link between advertiser objectives and the protections ultimately applied.
While efficiency is a meaningful benefit, the larger opportunity is consistency. Campaigns become easier to scale, governance becomes easier to maintain and critical expertise becomes more consistently applied throughout the workflow rather than relying on a series of manual handoffs across specialists and tools.
For Butler/Till, agentic AI helps teams apply healthcare media expertise, governance standards and campaign requirements more consistently and efficiently throughout the planning and activation process. As the industry moves toward more automated and agent-driven workflows, this shift goes beyond incremental improvement. It represents a fundamentally different approach to planning and activating media.