Two ad tech founders who've each built and sold startups before, pulling back the harness on how agentic advertising actually gets built with the founders and operators doing it.
Will AI Agents Revolutionize DSPs or Just the Clicking? | Olyzon Founder Jules Minvielle
In this episode of Unharnessed, Mo and Joe sit down with Jules Minvielle, founder and CEO of Olyzon, the Paris-born, New York-based startup building an agentic orchestration layer for media buying. They start with the name (a play on the Tupac song “All Eyes on Me”) and the French ad tech scene. Then they get into what it takes to run campaigns through AI agents.
Olyzon began with show-level scoring for CTV and now connects agents to 35+ platforms. These include The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, DV360, Spotify, YouTube, and direct publishers like Universal Ads. Jules says agents cut setup time by more than 80% and let traders optimize about five times more often. They also take over the email-and-attachment IO work that eats 10+ hours a week.
The conversation covers:
Why agencies are building their own agents, and why Olyzon’s harness plugs into them instead of replacing them
How email-driven trafficking works without needing access to a trader’s full inbox
How agents could reshape the ad tech chain, and why Jules is agnostic: the winner is whatever saves the most money for the least friction, and DSPs and SSPs still carry real value
Why AdCP and agent-to-agent buying are interesting but not yet at scale, with the volume still in programmatic and direct IO
Whether walled gardens will block third-party agents, and why Jules sees a clear move toward headless DSPs and open APIs
22 Oct 2026
Free TV Ads in Under a Minute: How ITV Is Democratizing TV with GenAI
In this episode of Unharnessed, Jonathan Moffie and Joe Hirsch welcome their first international guest, Jason Spencer, Business Development Director at ITV, the UK broadcaster, streamer, and producer behind Love Island.
Jason explains how ITV went from experimenting with Gen AI to producing TV ads for small and medium-sized businesses that once cost six figures and took weeks. His team now makes them in about a minute, at no cost to the advertiser. He covers:
Why ITV's early enterprise-license approach couldn't scale, and what changed with an "AI DJ" approach that picks the right tool for each job
How ITV built the UK's BCAP advertising code into the platform, and why the Clearcast approval process is "healthy friction"
Why ITV chose a concierge model over a self-serve platform, since a busy business owner gets one chance to impress
How pause ads became the easiest on-ramp for first-time TV advertisers, with repeat customers like Salisbury Racecourse
How UK broadcasters are collaborating on Lantern, a shared outcomes measurement platform, and on an SME marketplace
What's next: turning social video into YouTube campaigns, and making 50 ads at once for 50 locations
8 Oct 2026
Unharnessed Ep. 5: Agents Are Easy. Context Is Hard. w/ PMG’s Mike Treon
Everyone can build an agent. What makes one worth using? PMG’s Mike Treon joins Jonathan Moffie and Joseph Hirsch to unpack how an agency turns its data, workflows, and best media operators’ expertise into an agentic advantage. They explore why automated transactions are only the starting point, what adtech platforms need to offer beyond API wrappers, and how agents can improve planning, troubleshoot deals, and flag campaign changes before a human notices.
1 Oct 2026
Unharnessed Ep. 4: Where the Agentic Money Flows in 2027 with Eric Franchi
Six months ago, Eric Franchi's inbox started filling with a new kind of startup: companies building an agentic layer on top of every API and MCP server an advertiser can reach. Walled gardens, search, open web, ChatGPT, even DSPs. A couple turned into a dozen, then more than 25. Eric and his partner Corey gave the category a name: the Unified Media Platform, or UMP.
Moffie and Joe dig into whether UMPs create net-new spend or just redistribute existing budgets, and why platform risk is the bear case. Eric also explains why the smartest exits may come from acquirers nobody sees coming, as Pinterest's acquisition of TV Scientific showed. Plus: the AI tools a VC actually uses every day, why ChatGPT ads favor the big players for now, and Eric's three-layer map of the most investable agentic categories for 2027.
Disclosure: Eric's fund is an investor in Swivel, where Joe is founder and CEO.
24 Sept 2026
Unharnessed Ep. 3: Build it and they won't come
You ship the product. Launch day comes. Your dashboard is 0 across the board. Every founder has felt that. Mike Khristo has felt it enough times to build a company about it. Layers is an agent that reads your repo, makes the content, buys the ads, and traces every install back to what caused it.
On episode 3 of Unharnessed, we go deep with Mike on:
• Using agents for customer acquisition, including buying inside ChatGPT
• The alpha you get as a founder 💩 posting on X
• The rise of AI assistants like Muse and Instinct, and what makes this crop actually useful
• Joe gets free marketing advice for his vintage Native American jewelry side hustle
Unharnessed is hosted by Jonathan Moffie and Joe Hirsch.
17 Sept 2026
Unharnessed Ep. 2: Don't Ship Your (Agent) Org Chart, with Adam Epstein (Gigi)
Nobody wants a team of 30 sub-agents. They want their problem solved. Adam Epstein, co-founder of Gigi (a buyer agent for the Amazon DSP) joins Moffie and Joe Hirsch to make the case that your agent architecture is your business, not your product, and shipping it to the customer is the same mistake as shipping your org chart.
10 Sept 2026
Unharnessed Ep. 1: Boomers & Bots (Ads for Agents)
TIME started serving ads to AI agents. Perplexity blocked them and called it deceptive. OpenAds.ai (http://OpenAds.ai) co-founder and CEO Steven Liss joins Moffie (Magnite) and Joe Hirsch (Swivel) to ask whether a market for ads-for-agents survives the model providers — who controls agent traffic, where the leverage actually sits, and what this looks like 18 months out.
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