Agentic Advertising Trade Group Names First Board Members

The board's formation marks the latest milestone for an organization that has moved quickly. The ad-tech industry rolled out AdCP—an infrastructure standard for agent use in advertising spanning media buying and creative management—in October of last year. AAO formed nine months ago to promote it.

Advisors and working groups

The board will work with advisors Randall Rothenberg, formerly executive chair of the IAB, and Matthew Egol, previously CX subject matter expert at MMA Global. Masse said the two will guide how AAO markets AdCP, which advertising events it attends, and will "hand-hold" companies seeking to get started with the infrastructure.

Working groups will feed into the board's decisions. One group works on governance protocols for agentic media buying; another builds related measurement tools. Employees from major holding companies sit on these groups.

Masse framed the stakes plainly. Agentic technology is "akin to the arrival of the commercial internet," he said, and agents are already buying media across audio, TV, and out-of-home channels.

"Everybody in all directions [is] testing," he said. "It's still new, but it's actively being used and improved."

Adoption builds

Agentic use in advertising has become more common since AdCP's debut. Dentsu Benelux used agents to support media buying for a supermarket chain in the Netherlands. In December, agency Butler/Till ran a campaign with agentic buying for beverage brand Clubtails. Pubmatic, an AdCP partner that rolled out an agent-to-agent operating system this year, supported both campaigns.

AAO is pushing to bring more companies into the fold. The organization exhibited at the Digital Marketing Expo & Conference in Cologne, Germany, and will host its own town hall in New York this week—what Masse called "grassroots guerrilla" marketing.

"We need to make sure we repeat and explain what we do because I think 'agentic' is kind of a buzzword that you keep seeing everywhere," he said. "There's a lot of noise, and we need to explain what type of problem we're solving within the agentic space."

The IAB Tech Lab is also developing its own agentic protocol, and some in the industry have framed the two efforts as competing. Masse rejected that reading.

"It's like trying to compare traditional physics and quantum physics—one's not better than the other," he said. "They're just solving based on different perspective[s] [and] different set[s] of problems."

With more board appointments promised in coming months and agency-side seats still open, AAO's next test is whether it can convert advertiser enthusiasm for agents into formal participation in the standard itself.