Back in October, a consortium of digital advertising companies launched Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) with plans – and code – to address what many hope is a new wave of advertising brought on by automated agents that buy and sell digital advertising.
Today, that same group — which includes companies such as PubMatic, Triton Digital, ebiquity, Yahoo!, Scope3, Optable and Swivel — is moving ahead with what it believes is the logical next step for making AdCP a standard for all of advertising: establishment of a non-profit governance structure called AgenticAdvertising.org.
The consortium has chosen Randall Rothenberg, former CEO of advertising trade association IAB, and Matthew Egol, formerly of consultancies Booz & Co. and PwC, to guide the effort on an interim basis as the non-profit is constructed.
In addition to a new board and finalizing non-profit status with New York State, the governing body aims to create an “Advisory Council with balanced representation across brands, agencies, publishers, and ad tech to guide the mission, objectives, and principles of the organization.”
Founding consortium member and PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel and Messrs. Rothenberg and Egol spoke to tipsheet yesterday about the new Org’s plans including:
- The urgency for a governing organization for Ad Context Protocol (AdCP).
- Rothenberg and Egol discuss their interests in joining.
- What stewardship will look like for the organization.
- The Advisory Council and its composition.
- Regarding membership & milestones ahead.
- AdCP and its place in the open web.
- What “inning” are we in with agentic advertising?
- How to get involved and individual membership.
Scroll down for the interview which has been lightly edited for clarity.
TIPSHEET: Why is this the right time for a governing organization for Ad Context Protocol (AdCP)?
RAJEEV GOEL, CEO, PUBMATIC: AI is moving faster than any shift I think we’ve seen in marketing. Agentic systems are changing it – discovery, planning, optimization, measurement across the industry — and I think it’s really important the industry aligns around shared standards early. Otherwise, every company will start building their own agentic interface and we’ll have divergent protocols, a fractured ecosystem – and that just leads to more complexity.
The launch of AdCP showed that people want to move together on this, and I think we’re the only founding member of AdCP that was also a founder of OpenRTB. We have a long history of understanding how standards bodies work and how they bring people together in the ecosystem in order to scale, drive simplification and better standards.
AgenticAdvertising.org is how we create a clear, open path for the ecosystem, rather than having proprietary systems that set rules of their own, and then fragment the ecosystem. The timing right now, based on the energetic and enthusiastic feedback to the launch of AdCP, makes a lot of sense.
TIPSHEET: Randall, why tackle AgenticAdvertising.org?
RANDALL ROTHENBERG: Pretty simple. Rajeev already said it – we’ve never seen anything like this in our lives.
As exciting as the internet was circa 1997, this is even moreso because it just brings more opportunity, power and ability across broader levels – not just the marketing and media ecosystem, but across all businesses and human beings.
Just to throw a personal thing in here… during the past couple of years, I’ve been spending a lot of time doing digital music, composition and production, and, more recently, experimenting with the creative potential of so many of the consumer facing AI services. Once you start diving into the creative side of it, you realize from the first hour how expansive the potential is to do things in different ways, express your own creativity and build and restructure businesses if not whole industries.
How can you not be involved with something like that?
TIPSHEET: Rajeev, why did the coalition choose to work with Randall and Matt?
RAJEEV GOEL: They understand the full ecosystem and have earned trust across it.
Obviously, Randall knows how to build industry consensus on complex issues given his long history with the IAB and helping companies evolve their operating models during major shifts and given his background in consulting. Randall and Matt are also viewed as neutral, respected, and focused on what benefits the whole market. They give the AgeneticAdvertising.org body immediate credibility and strategic clarity. I think it’s as simple as that — not to mention they’re both very passionate about this opportunity. And I think that’s also critically important.
TIPSHEET: Matt, can you share some specifics on how you view the initial stewardship?
MATTHEW EGOL: I think AgenticAdvertising.org is a opportunity to have an impact and I’m really excited to contribute at an industry level. That’s always something I’ve personally been involved in — both with client consulting work as well as being on boards and doing pro bono work.
Consulting with this organization is exciting to help it launch with the right strategy, membership, governance, culture and really help have an impact now in terms of what we’re trying to achieve.
On what we’re trying to achieve, I think that agentic advertising can be viewed in a broader context of massive innovation around AI, which fuels culture of experimentation, fuels lots of test and learn. It fuels not only efficiency, but effectiveness opportunities. And I think that it’s a vertical play around advertising, but it needs to connect to other vertical plays like commerce, engaging around content and publishing and social and so on.
It’s not everything under the sun, but it’s agentic advertising and needs to connect to these other pieces within the customer journey. And that will allow optimizing these content experiences with data and analytics.
RANDALL ROTHENBERG: I think it’s important to add that Matt and I are joining this in order to help get it off the ground and shape it so it is sustainable in the long run. Our aim here is not to operate an organization. It’s to put it in the hands of people who have the ability to run it for the long term.
Matt actually led the Booz Allen team that worked on our failed attempt at IAB to take over the DMA, but was extraordinarily useful in charting the path forward. He’s also worked closely in strategic roles with GMA and MMA and other organizations. Plus he’s got a much deeper hands on experience with lots of brands and retailers.
And so given all that, we wanted to come together and try to do something that is difficult. It’s difficult because from the very start we’re trying to bring brands, marketing agencies and publishers and tech companies to the table as equal partners – having that breadth of representation and having that knowledge to bring all those folks into the room in a way that will be sustainable over the long run. That’s why we’re involved.
TIPSHEET: Is that what the Advisory Council is?
RANDALL ROTHENBERG: Yes. The goal is to launch an advisory council and do it soon, and to have equivalent representation among those segments. That’s pretty much all we can say about the Advisory Council at this point.
Regarding the council’s composition, one of the things that we really want to do is get out of the headspace that divides the world into buyers and sellers. Everybody needs to be a part of this. We are not inventing a new industry here. We’re inventing a new way of living, of doing business and creating things.
It’s not about buyers versus sellers, it’s not about effectiveness versus efficiency. It’s not about brands versus agencies versus publishers. This is about everybody in the “tent” together to create a very new world.
TIPSHEET: Rajeev, what are your thoughts on the milestones ahead for the Advisory Council?
RAJEEV GOEL: It’s really important to get practitioners — the ones building the rails and launching the transactions in the room together — to build out the standards and the protocols and share governance and how all of this works.
And what Randall is saying in terms of “buyers and sellers” is really important. Just this morning, there’s news that Pinterest is buying tvScientific and so you have what traditionally would be a sell-side company and traditionally a buy-side company coming together.
With AI, there’s an opportunity to scramble how the ecosystem works to create better solutions for consumers and for advertisers.
MATTHEW EGOL: This is a “big tent” approach. We want a diversity of membership within a “big tent” that’s going to include companies and individuals. It’s going to include people who are more like builders and implementers, not just people who are selling advertising. There’s a lot of innovation around agentic and creating solutions that make it easier to share data and sit on top of other foundations — different vertical solutions.
We want people in the “tent” who are collaborating. A big part of what we’re trying to orchestrate here is industry-level change. So, we want all the parties in the “tent” to foster that collaboration and drive change and adoption in the industry.
TIPSHEET: Can you talk more about the schedule ahead for you all?
RANDALL ROTHENBERG: It’s a moving target, right? Let’s just acknowledge that up front.
Our plan is obviously where we’re launching [today, December 12] and over the next couple of weeks, we hope to have some waves of members joining as founding members.
We hope to have a robust and diverse Advisory Council put together within the next month or two, we hope. And then we hope — heading towards the spring — that will constitute this formally under New York State incorporation law for non-profits with an active board of directors and various other things. We’re all heading towards these points. So it’s kind of very fluid. Those are the milestones.
Another important milestone is we want to keep “flying the plane” as we’re building AdCP.
The founding member group that includes Rajeev’s PubMatic and 22 other founding companies as well as hundreds of individuals who’ve been working on that protocol and governance issues — that’s got to keep going. Those are the milestones to develop the standards, the protocols, the practices and the behaviors that will define this new function.
TIPSHEET: Rajeev, can you see AdCP becoming an essential protocol for advertising such that it’s a key piece in the the survival of the open web?
RAJEEV GOEL: Yes. I do see it being an essential protocol that will help drive not only survival, but a successful and thriving open web.
The open web is at a critical juncture with continued pressure from the walled gardens. But evolution of ad formats, privacy regulations, scale of data, shifts in how buyers are conducting targeting… And so with AdCP, I think there’s a critical opportunity to use AI to solve a lot of the complexity and fragmentation that underpins a lot of the cost in the ecosystem.
So, we’re one week into agency holding companies IPG and Omnicom coming together. I think that is a good example of the economic forces at play in our ecosystem. We have to figure out as an industry how to drive scale results for advertisers and consumers. AI is probably the best chance that the industry has at doing that. AdCP sits right at the center of all of that.
TIPSHEET: Matt, how do you and Randall think about LLMs and the so-called “walled gardens”, such as Meta and Google, being involved with AdCP?
MATTHEW EGOL: I think we come back to the “big tent.” I think there’s a role for Large Language Models (LLMs) and for walled gardens. They have a lot of foundational capabilities. Many of them are horizontal in the case of the LLMs. If you think about the walled gardens, I think what we really want is an inclusive approach that has both larger and smaller players that provides democratic access.
We’re [in favor] of voting and participation that doesn’t skew to the larger players, but they’re welcome to participate. And we want everyone’s energy and contributions. We don’t want larger or smaller, necessarily. They’re all equal partners.
TIPSHEET: Randall, I’m curious how you think about other governance organizations, such as the IAB or the ANA, and how can they work with AgenticAdvertising.org?
RANDALL ROTHENBERG: The key word here is ecosystem. It’s forgotten that when we created the IAB annual Leadership Meeting back in 2008 or so, the moniker we used for the meeting was “Ecosystem 2.0.”
I’d like to think of this as “Ecosystem 3.0”. There is a lot of room and opportunity for many organizations to join in on this and provide their their wisdom and expertise which draws from the years that they’ve been doing business.
Rajeev mentioned before the OpenRTB coalition… That’s a good preface or model here. When Bill Simmons and others created the OpenRTB coalition, relatively early, they came to IAB and said, “Hey, would you guys be interested in absorbing us.” And at the point, we didn’t have the resources to absorb them. We couldn’t do it physically and didn’t have the human capital to be able to run this new thing.
And so what we said then was, “Let’s just keep the doors open and hope that we can get to the point where this can all work together.” And not only did it happen, but bringing the OpenRTB coalition into IAB really helped pave the path for the creation of IAB Tech Lab, which was a broader, global ecumenical organization.
I’m raising this because it’s a really good example, again, that these things are fluid. You want more people in the “tent.” You want to get more wisdom together if you’re going to create unifying standards and practices that build value rather than just subdivide the pie in new ways.
TIPSHEET: Rajeev, what “inning” do you think we are in with agentic advertising?
RAJEEV GOEL: I think we’re very early. Obviously, the industry has a long history with, let’s say, the machine learning branch of AI and using machine learning algorithms to drive traffic, shaping decisions, ad selection, pricing, all of these things. I think on the agentic side of things, we’re extremely early.
So whether it’s convenience, workflow, automation of planning and measurement activities… I think we’re in the first inning for what the potential of AI is in advertising. I would say with Gen AI overall that we’re only in the third inning. So I don’t think we could be any earlier in the advertising industry [with this initiative], given we’re still early in the revolution of generative AI,
TIPSHEET: Finally, how do people get involved?
RANDALL ROTHENBERG: I like the fact that you said “people” rather than “companies”.
One of our ongoing hypotheses is that there will be a tier which we hope will be a membership category for individual members. We keep thinking about this and it’s very important point to reinforce agentic advertising is not an industry. It is a practice. It is a function. I think at this point it’s a movement.
We want human beings to be involved as individuals as well as companies. How can they get involved? Starting [today], people and companies will be able to sign up and join. And when they do sign up and join, they’ll be able to participate in the processes that are already ongoing in the working groups.
MATTHEW EGOL: Go to the website. Get involved in the Slack community and the working groups. If you’re at CES, there’s a number of events that will be going on there to participate in and network. Randy and I will be there and attending a number of the members’ events. And there’ll be an event specifically around this there. We’re really excited to see people at CES get involved in the organization. That’s where we’re really excited for – everyone’s energy.
Visit:
- AgenticAdvertising.org
- AdContextProtocol.org
- Also, an AdCP Community meetup will take place in New York City on Thursday, December 18. Sign up is here.