A new agentic AI standard has the ad industry talking. What’s the big deal?
A group of companies with a lot riding on AI are betting on a new agentic protocol that they say could reshape digital advertising.
Earlier this month, the likes of Scope3, Yahoo and others launched Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open-source technicals standard designed to enable agentic AI, technology that allows AI agents to communicate with each other and perform tasks on people’s behalf.
Defenders say the shift to agentic advertising is “inevitable.” Skeptics aren’t so sure.
Augustine Fou, a fraud researcher and marketing consultant, cautioned that agentic AI doesn’t eliminate bad actors in the supply chain — agents can still act on behalf of people with bad incentives.
“More automation means less transparency,” Fou told The Current.
Do we need another protocol?
One big question: For its supporters, why is now the time to introduce AdCP?
“The industry goes through eras, and now we seem to be entering an agentic era,” Ben Kahan, senior director of programmatic at the media agency Brainlabs, told The Current. “But everything is siloed or fragmented. There hasn’t yet been a push for standardization across any of it. So, if you feel that the next step in ad tech is agentic AI, then you’ll need a protocol.”
Not everyone is convinced of the need for another protocol, especially with existing AI standards like Agent2Agent and Model Context Protocol already in play.
“What we don’t need is another industry trade group,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, told The Current.
“We have structures within the Tech Lab that are open-sourced, and anyone can work in [such as Ads.Cert]. We already have solved some of the problems that this AdCP initiative is trying to. … There’s no need to reinvent the wheel in some areas.”
That said, Katsur does see a role for agentic AI in the ad ecosystem. He noted that IAB Tech Lab is developing new standards that would support agentic frameworks, and more details are expected in the coming months.
“We are a shiny-penny industry, and agentic is a shiny penny — but I don’t think it’s blockchain,” he said. “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.”
Is agentic inevitable — or a distraction?
There’s no doubt that AI agents are top of mind for many in the advertising space. It was even the talk of the ANA Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando, Florida, last week.
But not everyone was completely sold. Shelly Palmer, president and CEO of The Palmer Group, warned marketers to “beware” of AI agents before implementing them into workflows.
“Agents are intelligence decoupled from consciousness,” Palmer said during a keynote at the event. “They are literally synthetic employees.”
Brian O’Kelley, CEO of Scope3 — which is a founding member of AdCP and has recently pivoted from reducing carbon emissions to agentic advertising — addressed concerns about agent trustworthiness in a recent blog post.
He explained that AdCP “requires publishers to register sales agents publicly” and that buyers must verify publisher domains to confirm what the AI agents are authorized to sell.
Joe Root, co-founder of Permutive, thinks a potential issue with agentic — and AdCP — is less about transparency and more about marketers taking their eyes off the ball.
“If the product doesn’t compete on incremental outcomes, it doesn’t matter,” Root told The Current. “AdCP runs the risk of publishers jumping to create agents when they haven’t fixed the foundational problem. … It could distract the industry from getting performance in line with the walled gardens.”
John Hoctor, CEO and co-founder of Newton Research — an AdCP founding member — disagreed.
“Walled gardens haven’t been shy about the fact that they’re planning to use agents to help their clients plan, buy, measure and optimize campaigns,” Hoctor said. “So I actually think leveraging agents is far from a distraction — it’s needed on the open web too.”
“Publishers, brands and agencies just need to be smart about choosing the right workflows and figuring out the best places to deploy agents in the short term.”
So, is the hype real?
As of now, the so-called agentic revolution seems to be slow-going — more promise than practice.
“Today, there aren’t any publishers forecasting transacting a single dollar against AdCP,” Root surmised based on his conversations. He added that, for now, AdCP mainly allows the industry “to congregate and get the ball rolling.”
Hoctor said that agents decisioning directly into the media buying process is “complicated,” and that agents could perform other tasks like analytics and measurement right now.
Trust remains a roadblock for some marketers when it comes to AI, Misha Williams, chief operating officer at GWI, told The Current.
“There remains a hesitancy to fully adopt,” he said. “What we need is for these agents to have real, human grounded insights at their disposal, so that marketers feel emboldened to experiment.”
Despite reservations, though, Root said that Permutive plans to get involved with AdCP because “it’s important to shape the direction of where the protocol goes.”
Brainlabs’ Kahan shared a similar sentiment: “As an agency, we have a responsibility to ride the wave and be part of those discussions.”
“If we aren’t, then we lose our voice,” he said. “We have to vocalize what we need for our clients. … There’s a consortium of at least 20 companies involved, but there’s always the risk that the ones making the rules are the ones with their finger on the scale.”