Agentic advertising trade group debuts board amid broader industry adoption

It’s been about a year since the ad-tech industry rolled out AdCP, an infrastructure standard for agent use in advertising including through media buying and creative management, in October. It’s been nine months since it formed AgenticAdvertising.org (AAO), a related nonprofit designed to promote AdCP. 

Now, the organization has a board.

The board’s roster, announced Monday, includes leaders such as WPP Media CEO Ingmar Zach and Salesforce’s senior director of product management, Gabe Joynt. In total, there are 22 seats of a total of 40 potential seats filled, Benjamin Masse, the president of the board whose day job includes working as chief product officer of Triton Digital and EVP of the iHeart Technology Solutions Group, told Marketing Brew. Ten seats each are allocated to marketers, publishers, agencies, and tech companies, and while tech and publisher representation is full, AAO is looking to add additional board members from brands and agencies.

The organization is building out its board as it continues to encourage adland to adopt agentic tools. Agentic technology is “akin to the arrival of the commercial internet,” Masse told us, and agents are already being used to buy across various channels, like audio, TV, and out-of-home, he said.

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

AAO has been working behind the scenes to identify potential board members, people who could provide a variety of perspectives, he added, “it took some time to be able to get to enough of these board members to have the credibility of being basically unbiased, having the perspective of all parties involved in the food chain,” he said.

Fair share

The board will work with advisors Randall Rothenberg and Matthew Egol, formerly the IAB executive chair and CX subject matter expert at the industry group MMA Global, respectively, to figure out how best to promote the open-source standard of agentic advertising, Masse said. Rothenberg and Egol will provide guidance on how to market AdCP, which advertising events to show up at, and “hand-hold” those seeking to get started using the infrastructure, he said.

The board will also take input from its working groups, which include employees from major holding companies. One group, for example, works on governance protocols for agentic media buying; another works on building out related measurement tools.

More members will be added in coming months, Masse said, noting that right now the board is low on brand members. It doesn’t yet have any major DSP representation either, as, per Masse, they are only “dabbling” in AdCP at this point.

“We’re quite eager to get the agencies and the marketers directly involved because our perspective was to avoid having a standard built by techies,” he said. “We wanted to have the two ends of the value chain—the marketer and the publisher—also actively working on the standards.”

Give it a try

Agentic use in advertising has become more common since the debut of AdCP. Dentsu Benelux used agents to support media buying for a supermarket chain in the Netherlands; the agency Butler/Till ran a campaign involving agentic buying for beverage brand Clubtails in December. (Both instances were supported by AdCP partner Pubmatic, which this year rolled out an agent-to-agent operating system.)

AAO is focused on bringing more companies into the fold. The organization showed up at the Digital Marketing Expo & Conference in Cologne, Germany, and will be at its own town hall in New York this week as part of some “grassroots guerrilla” marketing, Masse said.

“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 work is just one effort in adland to make agent use in advertising accessible. The IAB Tech Lab has also been working on its own agentic protocol. Masse emphasized that he does not view their work as in conflict, as some in the industry have suggested.

“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.”