Agentic advertising protocols and privacy: How new AI communication standards improve transparency

Several seismic shifts are happening this year that will impact the advertising technology ecosystem for decades to come. In addition to upcoming antitrust remedies, artificial intelligence is leading to the generation of a wave of new technical standards that are reshaping how advertising technology systems automate the purchase and sale of online advertising.

"Agentic advertising" serves as an umbrella concept that encompasses several distinct methods for automating the communication of information and negotiation between buyers and sellers of online media. 

Online advertising 

To better understand how autonomous agents can automate online advertising, it is useful to distinguish the key business decisions across the iterative processes of advertisers' planning, execution, measurement and optimization.

Planning involves allocating a pre-campaign budget among the various tactics advertisers use to invest their media spend. These tactics involve which vendors to use, which audiences to engage in specific geographies, the devices and ad formats in which to display advertising, within which media contexts, the creative of the ad itself, and the desired reach and frequency of exposures to achieve a desired return on that investment. 

Most planning decisions change slowly in cycles measured in months, such as brand suitability guidelines for both creatives and inventory. Media planning also contains slowly changing decisions in cycles measured in weeks involving specific audience definitions and creative specifications. Media owners also engage in pre-campaign planning by packaging and pricing their ad inventory, often with support from multiple vendors that provide data enrichment similar to what media buyers use to improve publisher yield. 

Execution involves buying media owners' ad inventory during a campaign that aims to engage the advertisers' desired audiences. These decisions often react in near real-time to optimize delivery, yield for publishers from their inventory and return on ad spend for media buyers.