Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. It’s protocols week! The Trade Desk is reworking RTB protocols, while others are working on agentic protocols…

The Ad Context Protocol Aims To Make Sense Of Agentic Ad Demand
Source: AdExchanger
October 15th, 2025

Summary: A new industry consortium has launched the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) to standardize how AI agents communicate across the advertising supply chain. The founding members—including PubMatic, Scope3, Triton Digital, Yahoo, Optable, and Swivel—are each committing $10K annually plus time and resources to establish open-source protocols for agentic tools to negotiate, plan, and execute media campaigns. Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley wrote this blog post about the new initiative.

We're still a ways from this happening, but the goal is to help buy-side and sell-side AI agents talk to each other effectively. AI agents are AI tools that can perform human-like tasks without human intervention. Initially, AdCP will offer two tools. Audience Activation Protocol, which will help advertisers find the right audiences, and Media Buy Protocol, which will enable AI agents buy media. An advertiser might use Audience Activation Protocol to prompt: "I want to find parents shopping for back-to-school supplies with household income over $75K in the Northeast," and many different publisher agents might respond with matching inventory packages and audiences to fit these criteria.

Eventually, these agent-to-agent deals could expand beyond digital to include OOH, linear TV, and other channels. The consortium hopes to have solid documentation and practical demonstrations within a year. 

Opinion: So let’s get this straight. The AdCP idea is to make it easier for buyers to discover audiences and buy advertising across many different platforms and publishers in a standardized, scalable, and efficient way. Hmm. Where have we heard of that concept before?

Okay, so this is not some earth-shattering value prop. We’ve been doing this for a long time in digital advertising using ad tech and programmatic and RTB. Glad we got that out of the way. But, this is compelling from the perspective of standardizing the use of agentic AI in ad tech. Clearly all of ad tech is going to move towards agentic workflows. So tackling these problems right now, in an open-source, consensus-driven fashion, is important work.

The biggest issue with using agentic AI tools to perform tasks today is a lack of a common language (AKA standardization) and trust (because, you know, this).

An agentic protocol (theoretically) enables standardization and trust! 

And open-sourcing the protocol means it can’t become some kind of strategic wedge for the walled gardens (like auction logic became for Google until header bidding came along); it becomes democratized across the industry. 

What else do we think standardized, agentic AI protocol could enable for the industry?

In this, there are obviously major implications for companies and people. Some bad, like companies get crunched out because they aren’t agentic-first and people lose their jobs. And some good, like we get rid of a bunch of unnecessary ad tech intermediaries and cut the ad tech tax. It should yield more value for publishers and for advertisers, which is fantastic!

But then again, that’s what we said about programmatic many years ago…

The Trade Desk Execs Share New Details About How Sell-Side Solution OpenAds Will Work🔒- A week after The Trade Desk unveiled its Prebid wrapper OpenAds, the DSP shared more details about how it works at the Prebid Summit. The platform features four core capabilities: Auction Code Attestation (cryptographic verification of the code running ad auctions); Sincera Integrity Signature (detects when bid request fields are manipulated); Auction Audit (gives publishers auction data like bid counts and participants); and Transaction IDs (restores the identifiers that Prebid.org disabled in August). Publishers can access these features through PubDesk, TTD's new publisher dashboard currently available to OpenPath users and rolling out to others after Thanksgiving. Publishers are skeptical that TTD has their best interests in mind (they are, after all, a platform that proclaims to exist only to serve the buy side). Check out AdExchanger's deep dive of PubDesk here.

The Trade Desk Is Now Selling Onsite Retail Media Ads, Pitting It Against Criteo🔒- The Trade Desk is making its move into onsite retail media ads through a partnership with delivery app Gopuff and commerce ad tech company Koddi (a Criteo competitor). For the first time, advertisers will be able to use The Trade Desk's demand-side platform (DSP) to buy sponsored product ads—the kind you see on retailer websites and apps. The deal lets brands buy these on-site ads alongside their other programmatic inventory (CTV, audio, display) in TTD. The offering is currently in beta and should be generally available in Q4, with additional retailer partnerships expected in 2026. This move puts TTD in direct competition with Criteo, which handles onsite ads for over 220 retail media networks. The two competed in offsite retail media for years, but this marks TTD's entry into Criteo's biggest growth area. 

Small advertisers gain access to CTV advertising in PubMatic-MNTN deal - SSP PubMatic is partnering with self-service CTV platform MNTN to connect smaller advertisers with premium streaming inventory from Paramount, Philo, Sling, and NBCUniversal. Early tests across 10 publishers grew revenue by 10%, driven by new demand from small advertisers who have historically been priced out of CTV due to higher CPMs, agency costs, and larger spend commitments. MNTN's predominantly self-serve platform eliminates the need for agency partnerships while providing the cross-channel measurement tools that performance-driven SMBs require. There’s growth to be had from the SMB market!

PubMatic: Our Nvidia partnership is paying off - In other PubMatic news, the SSP says that integrating Nvidia’s tech into its platforms has reduced latency from the industry standard of 5-10 milliseconds down to just 1 millisecond, resulting in 85% fewer auction timeouts and more revenue for publishers. It also delivers insights 60% faster and slashes energy consumption by 30%. Nvidia’s tech and infrastructure, including GPUs and inference servers, is giving PubMatic up to five times faster AI processing. Infrastructure investments are becoming a competitive advantage in a speed-obsessed, AI world. The news sent PubMatic's stock up 9.4%.

Advertisers Push Big Tech to Adopt Standards for Transparency in Ad Sales🔒- The Media Rating Council (MRC) has proposed new voluntary transparency standards for digital ad auctions, 80% of which happen in "closed loop", non-transparent environments today, run by major platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon. The standards would require platforms to disclose information like how they determine winners and what influences their auction mechanics—which bidders typically don't receive. Meta and Amazon participated in the MRC working group that developed the proposal, while Google declined to participate. 

Salesforce Expands Partnerships With OpenAI, Anthropic To Support Ads, Websites - Salesforce is integrating OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude models across its product ecosystem, including its Agentforce 360 platform, which helps companies manage AI agents across the enterprise. The move will help marketers turn every customer interaction into a personalized conversation. The AgentForce platform can help marketers generate emails, manage campaign workflows, and optimize paid media. Another tool, Agentforce Commerce, will help retailers sell their products through ChatGPT's new Instant Checkout feature.

Publicis Raises Outlook On Strong Q3 - Organic growth for the French agency holding company was 5.7% in Q3. It was even better in the US, at 7.1%, bolstered by big wins such as PayPal, Paramount Skydance, and Kimberly-Clark. Publicis raised its full-year guidance to 5%-5.5% organic growth, up from 4.5%-5%. Havas also had a good Q3, with 3.8% organic growth, driven by more business from the agency holding company's top-30 clients. Havas now predicts that its full-year organic growth will be between 2.5% and 3%, up from 2% previously.

Perplexity steps away from its advertising goals without measurable monetization results - The AI search startup is hitting pause on its advertising ambitions, with head of publisher partnerships Jessica Chan saying at Advertising Week that Perplexity is not "taking any new advertisers." The pullback comes shortly after ad sales head Taz Patel departed the company and reflects broader struggles to monetize AI search through ads. Even without ads, trust is a big issue; only 14% of consumers trust generative AI search results "a lot more" than organic search, while 37% have a "strong disinterest." Advertisers using Perplexity have also struggled to measure key metrics like CTRs and ROAS because the startup lacks tools that meet established ad standards. Long live Perplexity Advertising!

People Inc. Cuts 6% Of Its Workforce - The publisher is laying off 226 employees to redirect funds toward growth areas like creator partnerships and D/Cipher+, its contextual ad tech. It ain’t easy being a publisher right now.

Walmart partners with OpenAI so shoppers can buy things directly in ChatGPT - The purchases can be made through ChatGPT's new Instant Checkout feature announced last month. 

Index Exchange Launches A Data Marketplace For Sell-Side Curation - The new Data Vendor Ecosystem gives curators access to third-party data from partners like Experian, Audigent, and LiveRamp without separate integrations. 

Publisher alliance Ozone makes a larger play for US advertisers🔒- Ozone has added publishers Wall Street Journal, CNN, and New York Post to its offering, while trying to forge closer relationships with brands and agencies. 

WPP Commits $400M To Expand Google AI Partnership - The deal includes developing bespoke AI solutions for WPP clients, such as AKQA's "Generative Store" that dynamically personalizes product visuals, and training over 1,000 creative technologists by 2030.

Titan OS and Tubi Announce ‘Milestone’ Partnership to ‘Unlock Exclusive AVOD Advertising Opportunities’ in the UK - Titan OS now has exclusive access to sell Tubi's ad inventory across all CTV platforms in the UK. 

DirecTV will soon bring AI ads to your screensaver - The personalized screensavers powered by AI company Glance (a subsidiary of InMobi) will let viewers insert themselves into an AI-generated video or image or buy products through shoppable ads.

ADWEEK Introduces New Offerings During Advertising Week🔒- Okay, it’s not protocols week, there’s no such thing. Last week WAS Ad Week, though. The trade publication, ADWEEK (not to be confused with the event, Ad Week) launched a new newsletter, in-house studio, and more event opportunities for brands to serve ads. At Ad Week.

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