The advertising industry is no stranger to standards wars. But as agentic buying tools move from experimentation toward early deployment, the question has shifted to which new frameworks are actually worth the effort to adopt.
Over the past six months, the industry has seen a wave of new protocols aimed at enabling agent-to-agent advertising interactions, including the IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), AdCP and Amazon’s MCP efforts, which remain largely confined to Amazon’s own ecosystem.
Each protocol operates slightly differently. For example, IAB Tech Lab’s ARTF is more preoccupied with how efficiently code runs, while AdCP is more concerned with creating a shared language that allows agents to run natural language instructions correctly. But each protocol points to a future in which AI agents can plan, buy and optimize media across platforms more easily. Despite broad agreement that today’s APIs are brittle and expensive to maintain, adoption has been cautious, industry insiders told ADWEEK at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs.
“One of our hopes for this year is that those standards become interoperable,” said Travis Clinger, chief connectivity & ecosystem officer at LiveRamp, a data connectivity platform.
But when it comes to adoption, sources cited a familiar set of constraints: fragmentation across standards, limited engineering resources and an ongoing tension between efficiency gains and initiatives tied more directly to near-term revenue.
“Every technology company, every publisher, every advertiser will tell you the same thing: they don’t have enough engineers,” said Bryan Quinn, cofounder and president of Shopsense AI. “There’s a finite amount of time and folks they can invest.”
The hesitation is also economic. While protocols are often pitched as efficiency plays, Shopsense AI’s Quinn noted that internal product roadmaps tend to favor initiatives tied more directly to revenue growth. “Some of these protocols may have some headwinds as they try and navigate the internal dynamics on getting prioritization against other opportunities that have incremental revenue attached to them,” Quinn said.
“When it comes time to priorities, it can be very difficult for companies to say, ‘I’m going to deprioritize top-line opportunities,’” he added. As a result, he added, adoption may hinge less on technical merit, and more on whether a protocol reaches a tipping point where opting out becomes the riskier move.
PubMatic’s deep integration with publishers gives it an advantage when working with the AdCP protocol, according to CEO Rajiv Goel. Because the company already has structured visibility into publisher placements, pricing and audience data, it can return a complete inventory view when a buyer-side agent connects—rather than forcing agents to reconcile fragmented formats.
