Agentic advertising.
Agentic advertising is a new way to advertise. AI agents, including buying agents, selling agents, and more, act on behalf of brands, surface owners, and service providers. They transact directly across every surface where consumers are, with each agent carrying its principal's intent, standards, and economics into every decision.
We have been building this alongside some of the most forward-thinking brands in the world.
What is agentic advertising?
Agentic advertising is a model where AI agents, including buying agents, selling agents, and others, discover, negotiate, and transact across every surface where consumers are. Buying agents carry brand objectives, standards, and budgets. Sales agents represent what surface owners and service providers offer: advertising opportunities, audience data, creative services, governance, and the terms each is willing to transact on. They communicate directly through an open standard called AdCP, the Advertising Context Protocol. The result is a faster, more transparent, more flexible advertising market.
Last updated April 29, 2026.
Agentic advertising, in plain terms.
Here are five key concepts in agentic advertising.
What is an AI agent?
An AI agent reasons about a goal, plans a sequence of steps, and acts in real systems autonomously and on behalf of a principal. It goes beyond generating text or recommendations. It does things. As Scope3 CEO Brian O'Kelley puts it, "agents are what take us from AI on top of existing tech to building tech on top of AI."
What is a buying agent?
A buying agent is an AI buyer that acts on behalf of a brand. It translates objectives, budgets, and brand standards into advertising decisions, and transacts directly with the other agents on the Interchange: sales agents, signals agents, creative agents, governance agents, and others.
What is a sales agent?
A sales agent (also called a selling or seller agent) represents a surface owner or service provider: a streaming service, a news site, an AI assistant, a retailer, an out-of-home network, or a creative, signals, or governance provider. It exposes the advertising opportunities, services, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms the principal is willing to transact on.
What is a storefront?
A storefront (sometimes called an agentic storefront) is the agent-readable catalog of everything a surface owner or service provider offers: advertising opportunities, services, packages, audience data, creative specs, pricing rules, and terms. Buying agents and other agents discover, evaluate, and transact on it directly through the Interchange.
What is agent-to-agent advertising?
Agent-to-agent advertising is the transaction model behind agentic advertising. Buying agents, sales agents, and other specialized agents discover advertising opportunities and services, negotiate terms, execute the buy, and report outcomes directly, on behalf of their principals.
AI agents are already advertising for brands.
The world's largest brands are using AI agents to transform their marketing and advertising, including how they allocate budgets and execute campaigns.
Agentic AI is a key priority for brands in 2026.
66% of brands are increasing focus on agentic AI for advertising and campaign execution, with 96% already aware of it as a capability. (IAB)
Brands are betting on agents for personalization.
60% of brands will use agentic AI to deliver one-to-one marketing interactions by 2028. Gartner calls this "the end of channel-based marketing as we know it." (Gartner)
The agentic AI market is set to be massive.
~7× growth projected in the global agentic AI market by 2030, rising from $8B to $53B. (Markets & Markets)
How agentic advertising works.
Surface owners and service providers open storefronts for their offerings, making their data, creative, and governance capabilities discoverable to buying agents through AdCP.
Brief
Brands brief their buying agents in natural language. Surface owners and service providers open storefronts on the Interchange to merchandise and sell their advertising opportunities and products.
Discovery
Buying agents and other agents find each other through AdCP. The Interchange surfaces what fits: the brief on one end, the surface owner's or service provider's offerings on the other.
Negotiation
Agents agree on pricing, targeting, signals access, delivery, and creative requirements, within the boundaries each principal has set.
Execution
Brand standards, surface owner and service provider policies, and creative parameters are checked on every transaction before it executes. Nothing runs outside those boundaries.
Reporting
Outcomes flow back through the same protocol to every principal involved. Every decision is logged in full and feeds the next brief and the next listing.
Governance: Brand standards, surface owner and service provider policies, automation permissions, approval workflows, and audit trails are always active on every transaction.
What's different about agentic advertising?
Brands direct buying agents to negotiate across the Interchange with sales, signals, creative, and governance agents. Storefront owners merchandise their offerings once and become discoverable to every buying agent that speaks AdCP. Each side keeps control of strategy and policy; the agents handle the transaction.
For brands.
Buying agents translate brand objectives, audiences, and standards into decisions, then negotiate with the agents on the other side of the agreement: sales, signals, creative, and governance. The brand directs the agent's intent and the boundaries it works within; the agent does the rest.
Agent-to-agent
Brands' buying agents transact directly with everyone else on the Interchange. The brand and its counterparts sit on either end of every transaction.
Strategy-led
Decisions are made against brand objectives, not auction mechanics. The agent allocates budget like a portfolio manager across surfaces, formats, and audiences.
Every surface
Social, audio, AI assistants, sponsored intelligence, CTV, retail media, traditional media, out-of-home, and surfaces that have not been built yet.
Open by default
AdCP is the open standard. Any agent that speaks it can transact with any other, no matter what each one does. Brands are never locked into a single buying stack.
Governance built in
Brand standards, suitability rules, audience guardrails, and approval thresholds are enforced on every transaction: set once, applied without exception.
Improves with use
Every campaign teaches the agent something. The brand running agents over time is working with agents that know its DNA.
For storefront owners.
Storefront owners merchandise, sell, and scale their offerings on the Interchange. This includes their inventory, services, formats, audiences, and pricing.
Agent-to-agent
Agents bringing supply or other services transact directly with buying agents and any other agent that comes asking. The surface owner and its counterparts sit on either end of every transaction.
List once, every brand
Advertising opportunities, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms set up through one sales agent become discoverable to every agent that speaks AdCP.
Surface owner terms
Sales agents enforce the policies, prices, and packaging the surface owner sets. Each transaction passes those rules before it executes.
Open by default
AdCP is the open protocol that any agent can speak. The surface owner is never locked into a single buyer or distribution stack.
Governance built in
Sales-agent policies (suitability rules, category exclusions, surface-specific terms) are enforced on every transaction, alongside brand standards.
Improves with use
Every campaign helps improve your storefront. Sales agents get sharper at matching what the surface owner offers to the buying agents most likely to want it.
Every surface where consumers are.
Consumer attention has never been more distributed. A morning commute touches audio, transit screens, and a dozen social feeds. An evening at home moves between streaming, social, AI assistants, and retail environments. The line between content, commerce, and customer relationship is dissolving: a consumer asking an AI assistant for a product recommendation, discovering a brand inside a retail surface, and completing a purchase in the same session.
Social
Branded content, influencer slots, and sponsored posts across social surfaces.
Audio & podcasts
Host-read, dynamically inserted, and programmatic audio.
Connected TV
Pre-roll, mid-roll, and sponsorships across streaming surfaces.
AI assistants
Sponsored Intelligence inside ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and beyond.
Retail media
In-surface advertising opportunities across retail networks.
Display & rich media
Standard and high-impact formats across web and app.
Newsletters & email
Sponsored slots, native units, and dedicated sends.
Out-of-home
Digital billboards, transit, and place-based formats.
Events & sponsorships
Conference, webinar, and experiential packages.
In-game & live
Custom in-game experiences and AI-delivered slots within live broadcasts.
Data products
First-party segments, contextual data, and research panels.
And surfaces yet to come
Every new surface that adopts AdCP becomes reachable to every agent that speaks AdCP.
Sponsored Intelligence: brands inside the moment of decision.
AI is becoming the primary interface where people discover, research, and decide. The conversations happening inside assistants, copilots, and agentic experiences are advertising surfaces in their own right. The industry is starting to call this AI-native advertising. Sponsored Intelligence is the economic model that lets brands participate in those moments.
In every prior advertising model, ads were delivered adjacent to content: the banner next to the article, the pre-roll before the video. Sponsored Intelligence narrows that gap. Even where an ad appears alongside a response, it is surfaced inside an active decision-making moment and matched to explicit intent in real time.
AdCP, the open standard that makes it possible.
AdCP stands for the Advertising Context Protocol. It is the open standard that lets any agent transact with any other across any surface, regardless of what either one does. Built specifically for advertising, AdCP defines how advertising opportunities, signals, creative, governance, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms are exchanged between agents.
AdCP is published openly at agenticadvertising.org and is not proprietary to any vendor. Scope3 is a founding contributor and built entirely on AdCP. That is why the Interchange keeps growing, and why brands that connect to it through Scope3 are not dependent on any single platform's decisions about which advertising opportunities they can access.
The recent AdCP 3.0 release adds a Sponsored Intelligence Protocol covering session management, capability negotiation, brand safety, disclosure, and commerce handoff. This formalizes AI-native advertising as a named surface.
Common questions about agentic advertising.
Agentic advertising is a model where AI agents act on behalf of brands, surface owners, and service providers. A buying agent carries a brand's objectives, standards, and budget. Sales agents represent what surface owners and service providers offer: surfaces, audience data, creative services, governance, and the formats and pricing each is willing to transact on. Agents transact directly across every surface: social, audio, AI assistants, sponsored intelligence, CTV, retail media, traditional media, out-of-home, and surfaces that have not been built yet.
Agentic media is the broader category of media bought with the help of AI agents. It covers two paths: agent-to-agent advertising, where buying, selling, and other agents transact directly through an open protocol; and existing programmatic stacks with agents bolted on top. Scope3 is built on the perspective that agent-to-agent is the way the market is headed: a faster, more transparent, more flexible foundation for advertising.
Yes. Agentic advertising and agentic marketing are used interchangeably to describe the same model: AI agents transacting on behalf of brands, surface owners, and service providers across every surface where consumers are.
Agentic AI in advertising means AI agents that reason about goals, plan steps, and act on behalf of a principal (a brand, a surface owner, or a service provider). The agent translates that principal's intent into discovery, negotiation, and transaction across surfaces, with governance enforced on every decision.
Agentic commerce is the broader pattern of AI agents transacting on behalf of consumers and merchants inside AI assistants and agentic experiences. Sponsored Intelligence is the advertising counterpart: how brands participate in those same surfaces.
A buying agent is an AI buyer that acts on behalf of a brand. It translates objectives, budgets, and brand standards into decisions, and negotiates with every kind of agent the Interchange surfaces: selling, signals, creative, governance, and more. The brand stays in command of the strategy and standards the agent operates under.
A sales agent (also called a selling agent) represents a surface owner or service provider: a streaming service, a news site, an AI assistant, a retailer, an out-of-home network, or a creative, signals, or governance provider. It exposes the advertising opportunities, services, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms the principal is willing to transact on, and negotiates directly with buying agents and other agents that come asking.
Agent-to-agent advertising is the transaction model behind agentic advertising. Buying agents, sales agents, and other specialized agents (signals, creative, governance, and more) communicate directly to discover advertising opportunities and services, negotiate terms, execute the buy, and report outcomes. Every step happens between the principals' agents.
Several types of agents operate today. A buying agent acts on behalf of a brand. A sales agent (also called a seller or selling agent) acts on behalf of a surface owner. Beyond the two principals, specialized agents extend the taxonomy: signals agents expose audience data and segments for buying agents to use in decisioning; creative agents produce and adapt creative assets to each surface's formats and specifications; governance agents enforce brand suitability, content standards, and campaign policies. More agent types are emerging. Any agent that helps brands, surface owners, and service providers run agentic advertising can connect through AdCP.
AdCP, the Advertising Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets any agent transact with any other, no matter what each one does. It defines how advertising opportunities, signals, creative, governance, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms are exchanged. AdCP is published openly at agenticadvertising.org and is not proprietary to any vendor. Scope3 is a founding contributor and built entirely on AdCP.
Any surface a sales agent represents: social, audio, AI chat and assistants, sponsored intelligence, CTV, retail media, traditional media, out-of-home, events and sponsorships, and surfaces that have not been built yet. AdCP also connects agents bringing creative, signals, and governance services, not only surface owners. Every new participant that adopts AdCP becomes reachable to every buying agent that speaks AdCP.
Sponsored Intelligence is the economic model for advertising inside AI-native surfaces: assistants, copilots, and agentic experiences where consumers research and decide. Brands participate in the same reasoning context as the AI's response, matched to explicit intent in real time. AdCP 3.0 formalizes Sponsored Intelligence as a named media surface with standards for session management, capability negotiation, brand safety, disclosure, and commerce handoff.
Brand standards, suitability rules, audience guardrails, budget caps, and brand-safety thresholds are set by the brand and enforced by the buying agent on every transaction before it executes, in every market, every language, and every regulated category. Every decision is logged in full and exportable to compliance, finance, and measurement systems.
Governance is structural. The brand defines the boundaries every agent operates within and the approval thresholds that trigger human review, per brand, per market, per surface, per spend tier. The level of automation is a brand decision: observation mode, guided mode, or autonomous within authorized boundaries. Switch modes at any time, for any brand or market.
Either. Brands with existing AI infrastructure connect their own agents through AdCP. Brands without one can use agents built on Scope3. The brand stays in command of the objectives, governance, and standards the agent operates under either way.
Agencies still matter. A holding company or specialist partner can operate Scope3 on the brand's behalf, or run their own agents alongside the brand's. Scope3 fits into the agency relationships around it.
Scope3 takes a transparent margin on media that flows through the platform, built into media cost rather than added on top. Routed transactions are 4%; decisioned transactions are 8%. Volume discounts apply on monthly spend. See the pricing page for the latest.
Brands and agencies can join the preview to start running buying agents on the Scope3 Interchange. Surface owners and service providers can open a storefront so buying agents can find their advertising opportunities. Either way, the team will walk through onboarding at your scale.
Keep going.
Brands
The Interchange and how it works in practice for brands and agencies.
Storefronts for surface owners and service providers
How surface owners and service providers merchandise, sell, and scale every advertising opportunity through agent-readable storefronts.
The Scope3 perspective
The end of the internet as we built it, and why agentic advertising changes the math.
AdCP, the open protocol
The Advertising Context Protocol: discovery, negotiation, transaction, reporting. No lock-in.
Pricing
Transparent fees, tied to media spend.