The advertising industry has been adapting to new technological waves for decades. First it was search, then paid social, and then programmatic buying. What is happening now, according to David Posada, Managing Director for Latin America at Brainlabs, is qualitatively different: it is not just a new channel or format, but a change in who, or what, makes advertising decisions.
With over 25 years of experience leading operations in the region, first as Chief Digital Officer of GroupM LATAM and then CEO of GroupM Mexico, David Posada today leads the expansion of Brainlabs in Brazil and Mexico. From that position, he clearly observes an industry that is becoming more complex at a rapid pace, but at the same time is developing tools to become more manageable, precise, and efficient.
Agent-based advertising is already happening, although it is not yet consolidated
When talking about agent-based advertising, the conversation is often placed in the future. David Posada nuances that perception: it is already happening, to a greater or lesser extent, although there is a lack of standardization among platforms for it to reach its true potential.
Today it is possible to carry out tasks of implementation, optimization, and advertising reporting through artificial intelligence agents. Platforms like Claude or ChatGPT use connections known as MCPs, Model Context Protocol, that allow direct connection to Google Ads, Meta Ads, and Amazon Ads for optimizations and implementations through prompts. It is, in his words, "the beginning of what agent-based advertising can become."
But the next step is structural. What is being built right now is an ecosystem called Ad Context Protocol, or AdCP, which will allow the demand side and the supply side to communicate directly between agents, without the intermediaries that today make media buying slower, more expensive, and less transparent.
"For us as buyers, it will be something much cleaner, much more transparent, with far fewer actors. From the advertisers' perspective, this anticipates that there will be many more advertising results, because the ecosystem favors a larger portion of the money going towards working media."
When will that ecosystem be consolidated? He places it around 2028 or 2029. It is not immediate, but it is not far away either, so brands and agencies should start looking in that direction now.
The human role does not disappear: it changes
One of the most frequent questions regarding automation is whether human intervention will still be necessary. David Posada's response is that it will be, but with a different profile.
What agent-based advertising eliminates is not human judgment, but operational time. Implementing a campaign across multiple platforms today is an enormously demanding task. Brands have gone from managing ten ads to managing hundreds of variations for a single campaign. Automating that operational layer frees teams to do something more valuable: think, decide, and build.
"Managers, rather than just managers, are going to become builders, people who are capable of acting without needing many operational layers. I do see human intervention in supervision and judgment, but increasingly less in execution."
The analogy he uses to illustrate this is quite interesting: old cars were simple machines, but they required the driver to know mechanics. Modern cars are infinitely more complex, but they do not require anyone to know how they work inside. Advertising is heading in that same direction: more complex in its architecture, simpler in its daily operation, and more dependent on good drivers than on good mechanics.
Retail media: the third wave of digital advertising
If agency advertising is the horizon in two or three years, retail media is the opportunity that is already generating results, and that many brands have not yet embraced.
He describes it as the third significant wave of digital advertising, following search and paid social. And the numbers support that view: in Mexico and Brazil, retail media has been growing by about 40% between 2025 and 2026, far exceeding the average of digital media and, of course, traditional media.
In terms of participation, retail media currently represents approximately 12 or 13% of the digital media mix in Mexico. Considering that digital already accounts for 65% of total advertising investment in the country, that translates to about 8% of all brand advertising investment. A volume that makes it a relevant medium not only for its results but also for its weight within the ecosystem.
What makes it strategically attractive is that it allows brands to reach consumers with demonstrated purchase intent, and to do so throughout the entire funnel, not just at the closing moment. Within that ecosystem, it is possible to generate awareness, consideration, and conversion with audiences that have already indicated through their behavior that they are willing to purchase.
However, the retail media ecosystem in Mexico is highly concentrated. Nine out of ten dollars invested in this medium go to three players: Walmart, MercadoLibre, and Amazon. The remaining 10% is distributed among a long tail of smaller retailers.
A change that also transforms the internal structure of brands
The emergence of retail media changes how brands are organized internally to manage it.
Historically, traditional and digital media activities have resided in the marketing area, while the relationship with retailers has been the responsibility of commercial teams. These are two worlds that have operated in silos, with different logics, metrics, and objectives.
What David Posada increasingly observes is that this dividing line is beginning to dissolve. Marketing and commercial are converging because retail media requires speaking both languages simultaneously: the brand communication language and the sales language. It is a discipline with its own language, where conversions, short-term returns, organic sales versus paid sales, and new brand buyers are measured.
"Retail media is another new wave of advertising. It has elements related to what we already know, but it has a different language, a much more commercial language. This requires an additional effort from agencies to incorporate this discipline into their work."
Agencies need to develop specific capabilities to operate in this medium. It is not enough to apply the logic of paid social or search to an ecosystem that has its own rules, formats, and metrics.
The message to the industry
At the end of the conversation, David points out something he considers urgent for the industry: the standardization of metrics.
Each new advertising wave brings new ways to measure. And when each platform calculates these metrics differently, the result is noise, confusion, and difficulty in comparing results across channels. Retail media is a great example: Amazon, MercadoLibre, and Walmart measure ROAS, organic sales, paid sales, and new brand buyers with different attribution windows and their own methodologies.
The industry has already solved this problem before. The viewability standard for digital ads, adopted through the Media Rating Council, allowed all players in the ecosystem to share a common foundation for assessing whether an ad was actually seen. Something equivalent needs to be built now for retail media metrics and, later on, for the indicators that agentic advertising will bring.
"Just as it was once proposed that the standard for measuring awareness was reach and frequency, it would be important to start generating standards for how a ROAS is measured, how paid sales, organic sales, and attribution windows are measured."
Organizations like the IAB have a central role in this process: bringing together the different players in the ecosystem and building agreements that allow comparison, evaluation, and optimization on a shared basis.
Conclusion
The vision that David Posada projects for the next five years is not one of chaos or total rupture, but of accelerated evolution with an internal logic: the ecosystem becomes more complex internally, but more manageable externally.
New formats like micro-novels are capturing attention. Streaming already represents a significant portion of screen time in Mexico. Agentic advertising is advancing. Retail media is gaining weight. And in parallel, technology is building the layers of abstraction that will allow this entire ecosystem to operate with greater precision and less friction.
The differential will not be in who understands the mechanics of the engine better. It will be in who knows how to drive.