October 10th-October 16th // Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
In This Edition!
20+ ad tech companies find a way to cooperate (on agentic AI)
Salesforce's Agentforce takes on Big (Ad)Tech
Publicis wins every pitch because … AI
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Top Headlines🔥
20+ Ad Tech Companies Launch Standard So AI Agents Can Actually Work Together🔒
Source: Adweek
October 15th, 2025
Summary: More than 20 ad tech companies (including PubMatic, Magnite, Yahoo, Kargo, and Scope3) launched the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open-source standard that lets AI agents communicate with each other to buy and sell advertising. Think of it like establishing a universal language so that AI agents from different companies can negotiate deals directly, without humans. The protocol offers two main functions: finding and reaching specific audiences (Audience Activation Protocol), and automatically buying and managing ad inventory (Media Buy Protocol).
Today, if Nike wants to reach runners, they work with an agency who uses a demand-side platform (DSP) to bid in programmatic auctions managed by supply-side platforms (SSP) connected to publisher sites. With AdCP, Nike's AI agent would simply ask "find runners interested in marathon training," and publisher AI agents would respond with "we have 50,000 runners on our fitness app, $12 CPM"—then execute the deal automatically. Theoretically, Nike wouldn’t need an agency, a DSP, or an SSP in the middle.
Opinion: The industry already connects buyers to audiences across platforms through programmatic advertising—this just extends that capability to AI-to-AI communication. If AdCP succeeds, AI agents could cut out traditional ad tech middlemen entirely, reducing fees and putting more money in publishers' and advertisers' pockets. The flip side? Many jobs and intermediary companies become obsolete when AI agents handle negotiations directly.
Salesforce Launches Agentforce 360, Latest Salvo in AI Ad Tech Battle🔒
Source: The Information
October 13th, 2025
Summary: Salesforce's Agentforce 360 puts the company squarely into the AI agent wars against companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Salesforce's AI agents can measure ad campaign performance by analyzing vast stores of data, and even pause underperforming campaigns. One consultant said that 10%-20% of his clients are testing Agentforce for media planning, which could lure marketers to Salesforce’s CRM.
Opinion: Marketers will likely consolidate around one or two AI providers to manage their marketing stacks, which could make this a winner-take-most market. For agencies and brands experimenting with multiple AI vendors now, they'll have significant advantages when these systems mature. Salesforce is positioning itself to be in the winners circle.
Publicis Won Every 2025 Pitch Using AI
Source: Marketing Dive
October 15th, 2025
Summary: The agency holding company's CoreAI platform was in every pitch the network won this year. Publicis now has 80% of its connected media—representing 60% of net revenue—driven by AI. Publicis says AI is also creating an influencer media platform that delivers "the same reach as the Super Bowl for only a fraction of the cost."
Opinion: Publicis is proving that AI is a revenue driver that wins pitches and expands scopes of work. For brands, this means your agency's AI sophistication is becoming as important as their creative talent.
New Products & Features 🚀
What It Does: Teradata's AI agents analyze real-time signals across tens of millions of customer data points to proactively increase customer lifetime value.
Quick Take: Smart focus on CLV—measurable ROI that CFOs understand makes it easier to justify AI budgets. For marketers, AI doesn't just predict customer value but actively works to increase it.
What It Does: Claude Haiku 4.5 is said to deliver similar coding performance to Claude Sonnet 4 (released in May) and OpenAI's GPT-5 at one-third the cost and twice the speed. The model is priced at $1/$5 per million tokens and available to all users, including free tier customers.
Quick Take: Anthropic is racing to keep up with OpenAI by releasing models at breakneck speed. For marketers, what was frontier AI performance in May is now available at commodity pricing, significantly reducing costs for AI-powered customer service and content generation at scale.
AI Use Case of The Week💡
The Setup: PubMatic integrated NVIDIA's tech into its infrastructure to bolster the speed and computing power of its sell-side platform.
The Solution: PubMatic deployed NVIDIA's L40S GPUs (chips) for real-time ad decisioning, Triton Inference Servers for traffic shaping, and RAPIDS Accelerator for analytics.
The Results: The system processes ad decisions in microseconds—thousands of times faster than consumer AI applications like ChatGPT.
5x faster AI processing compared to traditional systems
Reduced inference latency from 5-10 milliseconds to 1 millisecond
85% fewer auction timeouts, unlocking millions in lost ad spend for publishers
2x faster campaign data processing with insights delivered 60% faster
Why This Matters: This collaboration shows that smaller ad tech companies can now access AI capabilities previously available only to walled gardens with massive infrastructure budgets. The open internet can compete on technological capability, not just scale.
Marketer Action: Evaluate whether your partners have the infrastructure to deliver microsecond-level decisioning and real-time optimization.
Other Notable Headlines📌
New WPP CEO's First Move: $400M Bet on Google's Gemini and Veo🔒- WPP will get early access to Google's latest AI models, letting the agency holding company build campaigns "in days instead of weeks" and deliver real-time personalized marketing at scale.
Walmart's ChatGPT Partnership Aims to Close Gap With Amazon's Rufus - Shoppers will be able to buy products through ChatGPT. Walmart's own AI assistant, Sparky (launched in June 2025), trails Amazon's Rufus, which debuted in February 2024.
DirecTV Will Put Your AI-Generated Face in Screensaver Ads Starting 2026 - DirecTV's Gemini streaming devices will display screensavers that let users create AI avatars that "try on" products from a trillion-SKU catalog.
That’s It For This Week 👋
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