IAB Tech Lab, not a fan of AdCP, releases an agentic advertising framework

Agentic AI has recently bubbled into the mainstream throughout the ad tech community.

A vocal group in particular has been singing its praises; last month, a group of companies launched Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), a technical framework aimed at standardizing agentic advertising, where AI agents would perform tasks on people’s behalf throughout the chain.

But not everyone was sold on AdCP. IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur previously told The Current that the industry did not need “another industry trade group” and noted that the Tech Lab already addresses some of the issues AdCP is trying to tackle.

Now the Tech Lab is making its own moves. On Thursday, it announced the release of the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), to standardize agentic workflows across the programmatic ecosystem.

Further, earlier this month, LiveRamp donated its agentic open standard User Context Protocol (UCP) to the Tech Lab. In an announcement, Katsur wrote that UCP is “an open standard that defines how intelligent agents in advertising exchange signals,” including identity signals, contextual signals and reinforcement signals.

In a press release, Tech Lab said that the goal of ARTF is to reduce latency of real-time bidding and responses by 80%.

It will also support agentic AI protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent: “These standards, combined with IAB Tech Lab’s open-source infrastructure and GitHub collaboration model, allow participants to experiment and contribute to the specification in real time.”

“We are a shiny-penny industry, and agentic is a shiny penny — but I don’t think it’s blockchain,” Katsur quipped in a previous interview with The Current.

“There is something of substance there. But we need to think about what the real pain points are where agents can solve problems. When I think of agents, I think of superhumans. They’re good at needle-in-the-haystack problems.”

Containerization is key

While the timing might suggest the ARTF is a response to AdCP, Katsur said in a press release that it’s the culmination of “months” of collaboration across the industry.

And make no mistake: It’s a different beast than AdCP and not just another protocol, the main differentiator being containerization.

The Tech Lab has described a container like a shipping container, but for software: “Just as physical containers allow goods to be packed, stacked and shipped efficiently across the world — regardless of what’s inside — software containers package up all the code and dependencies an application needs to run.”

Adam Heimlich, CEO of Chalice — which has helped develop a custom container-based bidstream augmentation solution — told The Current that real-time bidding “was built for multiple servers to send messages back and forth.” Containerization, though, can do “the same thing in one server” and it “eliminates the bottlenecks” of server-to-server connection, enabling agentic workflows.

On that note, the framework, according to the press release, will use “containerized architecture to enable faster communication and more efficient data exchange between technologies operating within the same data center.”

Some companies, including Chalice and Index Exchange, have already expressed support for ARTF.

“At Index, we’ve spent the past year advancing agentic services through partner container integrations,” Joshua Prismon, chief architect at Index Exchange, said in a statement.

“With agentic standards applied through ARTF and powered by OpenRTB, companies can seamlessly unlock the full potential of sell-side decisioning, enabling precise, real-time, per-impression choices based on what matters most to them and their customers.” 

In other words, as Heimlich put it, ARTF is building on a “proven” foundation in the programmatic ecosystem — whereas AdCP “went far in trying to standardize something that’s unproven.”