Swivel Wins the 2026 AdExchanger Award for AI Innovators in Agentic Platforms and Operating Systems

Recognition arrives as the company moves from one live transaction to repeatable campaigns and agentic media planning

NEW YORK, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Swivel, the agentic orchestration layer for modern ad operations, today announced it has won the 2026 AdExchanger Award in the category "AI Innovators – Agentic Platforms & Operating Systems." Winners were announced at the AdExchanger Awards Gala on September 28 during Programmatic I/O New York. Finalists were selected by an independent panel of senior industry practitioners and judged on innovation, measurable impact, and technical execution.

Swivel's founders have spent their careers building the ad serving infrastructure premium video publishers run on, and started the company after watching those systems become the limit on what publishers could sell. In CTV, the products that carry the most value are also the ones that demand the most coordination to execute. Swivel's agents take on that coordination, which frees publishers to sell more of their most valuable inventory.

"Every buyer is going to show up with an agent, and the publishers who grow from here will be the ones whose agents can sell," said Joseph Hirsch, CEO and Co-founder of Swivel. "Swivel started building that side of the market before anyone was asking for it, and this award tells us the rest of the industry is ready for that future."

By late 2025, agents existed on both sides of the transaction with no shared way to reach each other. Swivel co-founded the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) in October 2025 alongside Scope3 (now Apostra), Yahoo, Optable, PubMatic, and Triton Digital, then put the standard into production immediately. At the launch event, Hirsch and Scope3 Co-founder Emma Mulitz completed the industry's first live agent-to-agent media transaction, with agents carrying the workflow from buyer brief through campaign execution.

Live campaigns with other buyer agents and real advertiser budgets followed. In December 2025, Swivel and PurePlay ran a fully agentic CTV holiday campaign for a national retail brand that took an activation historically requiring days of coordination down to under one hour, an estimated 70% reduction in workflow time. The campaign drove a 6% lift in retail foot traffic attributed to the buy. In April 2026, Swivel and Olyzon connected a third buyer agent to Swivel's seller agent for a campaign supporting Pierre Fabre's Avène brand, and the two companies have continued transacting through that connection since.

"The first transaction showed that two agents could complete a deal. The campaigns since have shown it can become infrastructure," said Joe Melaragno, EVP of Platform at Swivel. "Once a publisher can encode how it packages, prices, and approves its inventory, the agent can do far more than execute a transaction. It can start turning demand into a plan, and an approved plan into a live campaign."

Swivel's seller agent interprets buyer briefs, builds and prices media plans within publisher-defined rules, routes them for approval, and carries approved plans through trafficking, creative matching, and delivery. It allows publishers to scale the custom packages, sponsorships, guaranteed campaigns, and other differentiated products that have historically required the most human coordination to sell.

The industry has spent the last year asking whether autonomous agents could complete a media transaction. Swivel's publishers have moved on to a bigger question, which is how much of the business agents can run, and every subsequent campaign expands the answer. 

To learn more about Swivel, visit www.swivel.ai.

About Swivel
Swivel is the agentic execution layer for advertising operations. Purpose-built for the sell side, Swivel translates operator intent into coordinated actions and executes campaign updates, pacing adjustments, and optimizations across connected platforms. Swivel orchestrates execution across the stack, replacing fragmented workflows with a system built to act. Leading streaming publishers and video platforms use Swivel to move faster, act smarter, and scale with precision. For more information about Swivel and its suite of solutions, visit www.swivel.ai.

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SOURCE Swivel