Agentic advertising protocols
Ad Context Protocol (AdCP)
Created in October of 2025 by a consortium of organizations including Yahoo, PubMatic, and Optable—and helmed by Scope3 CEO and AppNexus co-founder Brian O’Kelley—AdCP is an open-source protocol that allows agents to communicate, as well as plan, negotiate, and execute media buys across different ad platforms. Built on MCP, AdCP is meant to standardize agentic digital ad transactions. The standard is overseen now by an independent industry group, AgenticAdvertising.org.
Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF)
Designed in November 2025 as an alternative to AdCP, the IAB Tech Lab-created ARTF embodies a different approach to agentic media buying. Whereas AdCP provides a shared language for agents to negotiate ad campaigns with platforms, ARTF seeks to update the infrastructure of real-time bidding to accommodate both agents and more efficient standard media buys. It does so by offering a containerized framework that lets agents operate within existing SSP and DSP environments but promises lower latency auctions.
“It is doing overdue modernization [of real-time bidding infrastructure], as well as opening the gateway for the agentic world to be able to transact with the supply chain,” Shailley Singh, executive vice president of product and chief operating officer at IAB Tech Lab, explained to ADWEEK upon the launch of the framework.
ARTF has since become the keystone of the IAB Tech Lab’s wider Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP), an initiative that houses a range of agentic protocols for connecting buy- and sell-side tech, agentic guardrails, and an agent registry system.
Agentic Audiences (formerly User Context Protocol)
Introduced originally by LiveRamp last year and donated to the IAB tech Lab, UCP, later rebranded as Agentic Audiences, provides a framework for agents to exchange user-level data in a privacy-safe way. Using the infrastructure, one agent can speak to another and swap identity and contextual signals—in essence, information about who a user is, what they are doing, and how they respond to given content—without exposing sensitive data on the user.
And instead of trading huge datasets about the user, Agentic Audiences lets agents use condensed machine-readable embeddings, which allows interpret data faster and with reduced energy expenditure. The framework is part of the IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP. It has been integrated with OpenRTB and Prebid to help seed industry adoption.
Agentic Mobile
Created by CloudX before being donated to the IAB Tech Lab and folded into AAMP, Agentic Mobile takes the logic of agentic digital ad transactions and translates it to mobile.
Other lesser-known standards, such as Agentic Ad Object (a derivation of AdCOM), and various buyer and seller reference agents, also live within AAMP alongside ARTF, Agentic Audiences, and Agentic Mobile. These are part of a management layer that establish rules for how buy- and sell-side agents discover, negotiate, and complete orders.
