Why the Future of Advertising Depends on What We Build Right Now

Twenty years ago, a small group of pioneering companies came together to create OpenRTB with a simple conviction: open standards don’t just prevent fragmentation; they create opportunity.

That bet paid off. OpenRTB enabled a $750+ billion industry built on competition and innovation, transforming how digital advertising works.

Now, we’re at another inflection point.

This week, PubMatic was the only company from that original OpenRTB founding group to co-found a new initiative. We joined other AI leaders across the industry to launch the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP). AdCP is the open standard for AI agent communication in digital advertising, a critical foundation for the next era of programmatic advertising.

Unlike OpenRTB, which focused on the transaction layer of digital advertising, AdCP has the potential to standardize the entire advertising workflow – from campaign planning and audience strategy through execution, optimization, and measurement.

After nearly two decades in programmatic advertising, I’ve learned to recognize pivotal moments. This is one of them. The decisions we make now, as an industry, will determine whether the agentic future is open or closed.

The Agentic Era Isn’t Coming; It’s Here

AI agents, autonomous systems capable of planning, negotiating, and executing advertising campaigns, are already in development across the industry. Every major platform is deploying AI to manage everything from audience targeting to campaign optimization. At PubMatic, we’re building, out in the open, agent-to-agent solutions that demonstrate what’s possible when companies collaborate.

The question isn’t whether agentic advertising will become reality. The question is whether this transformation will happen through open, interoperable standards or through proprietary systems that recreate the black box ecosystems we’ve spent years trying to open up.

AdCP is the industry’s answer to that question.

Beyond Activation: Standardizing the Entire Workflow

OpenRTB was revolutionary, but it only addressed one part of the advertising lifecycle: the transaction. Even then, it’s limited – there’s no notion of an inventory object, ad campaign, or a performance KPI. Beyond the impression and the bid, everything else is manual – planning (RFI documents), optimization (spreadsheets), measurement (log files), remains fragmented and manual.

Agentic AI changes this. For the first time, we can standardize how agents communicate across the entire workflow. A planning agent can collaborate with publisher agents to identify optimal inventory before a campaign launches. An optimization agent can negotiate in real-time based on performance signals. A measurement agent can aggregate results through standardized interfaces, providing unified attribution without proprietary black boxes.

This is the promise of AdCP – not just standardizing transactions but standardizing the language agents use across every stage. The efficiency gains will be transformational.

Why Publishers Should Act Now

Let me be direct: publishers have the most to gain from AdCP. Which is why they should help shape it.

In today’s programmatic ecosystem, publishers navigate dozens of tools to monetize their inventory. Each intermediary extracts value. Each hop obscures signal. Despite owning culture-creating content, publishers have the least control.

Agentic AI could make this worse or actually fix it. If advertisers deploy proprietary agents that only work with select platforms, publishers lose leverage and the open internet loses ground. But with open standards, publishers maintain control while staying accessible to any buyer, regardless of platform.

The choice is being made right now. AdCP governance is being designed with publishers at the table from day one. Technical specifications are being refined today to keep publishers, and their partners, at the helm.

The Infrastructure Challenge

Here’s something the industry needs to understand: implementing AdCP isn’t just about adopting a protocol. The agentic future requires fundamentally different infrastructure.

According to Dell Technologies infrastructure experts, agentic AI systems require 20 to 30 times more compute power than generative AI systems, which themselves demand significantly more compute power than current programmatic systems. That’s not a minor upgrade; it’s a complete transformation. Most legacy platforms are already struggling. Many process only a fraction of available impressions, relying on probabilistic bidding because they can’t handle today’s data volumes. When agentic AI really scales, that gap will become a chasm.

Five years ago, we anticipated this shift. That’s why PubMatic collaborated with NVIDIA to rebuild our infrastructure from the ground up, creating the industry’s first scaled GPU-accelerated programmatic platform.

This infrastructure powers our Activate solution, a direct-connection technology that processes every impression in real-time. It’s designed to support the high-speed, agent-to-agent communication that AdCP enables, handling the computational demands of agentic advertising without the latency constraints that limit many current systems.

This is why PubMatic is uniquely positioned to co-found AdCP. We have the infrastructure to prove the protocol works. We have the deep expertise from pioneering OpenRTB, the partnerships built over decades, and the conviction that open standards create more value than any single company can capture alone.

We’re all-in on AdCP, not just as participants, but as a foundation others can build upon. The standard is open. The opportunity is shared. And we’re ready to demonstrate what’s possible when the industry builds together.

Competition Requires Collaboration

There’s a paradox at the heart of healthy markets: meaningful competition requires foundational collaboration.

This is what makes building digital infrastructure compelling. Your competitor today is your co-innovator tomorrow. That dynamic, collaboration on standards and competition on execution, drives real innovation.

AdCP follows the same philosophy. It doesn’t dictate business models or product features. It establishes the communication layer. How companies build on those rails, what agents they create, what value they deliver, that’s where competition happens. That’s where the best technology wins.

We’re seeing this play out in real time. Recent regulatory actions underscore a fundamental truth: markets work best when they’re open and genuinely competitive. Proprietary standards that create lock-in don’t serve that goal. Open protocols do.

An Invitation to Build

If you’re a publisher, now is the time to engage. PubMatic is open for any publisher interested in understanding AdCP and influencing its development. We’re sharing our technical approach openly because we believe a rising tide lifts all boats, and because AdCP only succeeds if it serves the full ecosystem.

If you’re an advertiser, platform or technology provider, the same invitation applies. AdCP is open source. The documentation is public. You can start building today. The question is whether you’ll help shape the standard or find yourself integrating with decisions made without your input.

The agentic future is being built right now. OpenRTB taught us that the companies who show up early, who contribute to the foundation, who collaborate on standards while competing on execution, those are the companies that will thrive in the new era.

PubMatic was there at the beginning, and we’re proud to be at the table again today.

Let’s build it together.

Learn more about AdCP and join the conversation at adcontextprotocol.org.