Agentic advertising.
Agentic advertising is a new way to advertise. Buying agents act on behalf of brands. Sales agents act on behalf of surface owners. The two 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 — buying agents on behalf of brands and sales agents on behalf of surface owners — discover, negotiate, and transact across every surface where consumers are. The buying agent carries the brand's objectives, standards, and budget. The sales agent represents the surface owner's inventory, pricing, and terms. The two communicate directly through an open protocol called AdCP, the Advertising Context Protocol. The result is a faster, more transparent, more flexible advertising market that works for both sides.
Last updated April 29, 2026.
Agentic advertising, in plain terms.
Five concepts do most of the work in agentic media: AI agent, brand agent, sales agent, storefront, and agent-to-agent. Once those are clear, the rest of the model follows.
What is an AI agent?
A large language model can generate text. An agent goes further: it reasons about a goal, plans a sequence of steps, and acts in real systems. 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 brand agent?
A brand agent (also called 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 surface-owner sales agents.
What is a sales agent?
A sales agent (also called a seller agent) represents a surface owner: a publisher, a platform, an AI assistant, a retailer, an out-of-home network. It exposes the inventory, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms the surface owner is willing to transact on.
What is a storefront?
A storefront (sometimes called an agentic storefront) is the agent-facing representation of everything a surface owner offers: inventory, packages, audience data, creative specs, pricing rules, and terms. Buying 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. A brand's buying agent and a surface owner's sales agent discover inventory, negotiate terms, execute the buy, and report outcomes — directly, on behalf of their principals.
AI agents are already buying advertising. The brands moving first will define how it works.
The world's largest brands are putting agents in front of real budgets. The infrastructure is forming, the protocols are open, and consumer behavior is in motion.
Agentic AI is a key priority for buyers in 2026.
66% of ad buyers are increasing focus on agentic AI for ad buying 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.
On both sides of the marketplace, principals encode their context once. Brands brief their buying agents on objectives, audiences, budget, and standards. Surface owners list inventory, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms through their sales agents. The two transact directly through AdCP.
Brief & list
Brands brief their buying agents in natural language. Surface owners list inventory, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms through their sales agents.
Discovery
Buying agents and sales agents find each other through AdCP. Both sides surface what fits: the brief on one end, the surface owner's terms on the other.
Negotiation
The two agents agree on pricing, targeting, delivery, and creative requirements, within the boundaries each principal has set.
Execution
Brand standards and surface-owner policies are checked on every transaction before it executes. Nothing runs outside those boundaries on either side.
Reporting
Outcomes flow back through the same protocol to both principals. Every decision is logged in full and feeds the next brief and the next listing.
Governance: Brand standards, surface-owner policies, automation permissions, approval workflows, and audit trails are always active on both sides.
What changes.
Two things become true on both sides of the marketplace. Economics are transparent: every fee is visible. And every transaction teaches the agent something. The brand or surface owner running agents for a year is working with knowledge that took a year to accumulate. The bespoke part of the change shows up on each side of the transaction.
For brands.
Buying agents translate brand objectives, audiences, and standards into decisions, then transact directly with surface owners' sales agents. The brand directs the agent's intent and the boundaries it works within; the agent does the rest.
Agent-to-agent
A brand's buying agent transacts directly with a surface owner's sales agent. The brand and the surface owner sit on either end of every transaction.
Strategy-led
Decisions are made against brand objectives. 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 protocol. Any buying agent can transact with any sales agent that speaks it. The brand is never locked into a single platform or buying stack.
Governance built in
Brand standards, placement 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 for a year is working with agents that know its DNA.
For surface owners.
Sales agents list inventory, formats, audiences, and pricing on the terms the surface owner sets, and buying agents come asking for what fits. The surface owner controls what is offered, to whom, and at what price; the agent represents that to every brand on the Interchange.
Agent-to-agent
Sales agents transact directly with brand buying agents. The surface owner and the brand sit on either end of every transaction.
List once, every brand
Inventory, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms listed through one sales agent become discoverable to every buying 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. The surface owner is never locked into a single buyer or distribution stack.
Governance built in
Sales-agent policies — placement rules, category exclusions, channel-specific terms — are enforced on every transaction, alongside brand standards.
Improves with use
Every brief informs the next listing. Sales agents get sharper at matching what the surface owner sells 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.
Surface owners build sales agents that represent everything they sell, on their own terms. Every format, every audience, every context, listed once and discoverable to every brand whose buying agent speaks AdCP.
The brand's agents adapt to each surface's strengths while remaining distinctly the brand. A luxury brand does not show up the same way on a sports podcast as it does on a premium streaming platform — but it shows up as itself on both.
Social
Branded content, influencer placements, and sponsored posts across social platforms.
Audio & podcasts
Host-read, dynamically inserted, and programmatic audio.
Connected TV
Pre-roll, mid-roll, and sponsorships across streaming platforms.
AI assistants
Sponsored Intelligence inside ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and beyond.
Retail media
On-platform placements across retail networks.
Display & rich media
Standard and high-impact formats across web and app.
Newsletters & email
Sponsored placements, 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 placements 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 buying agent that speaks the protocol.
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 a placement appears alongside a response, it is surfaced inside an active decision-making moment and matched to explicit intent in real time.
OpenAI is running ads inside ChatGPT. Amazon is exploring infrastructure for AI assistants on third-party apps. Booking.com, Instacart, and Shopify are connecting commerce directly into chat. AdCP 3.0 formalizes Sponsored Intelligence as a named media surface, with standards for session management, capability negotiation, brand safety, disclosure, and commerce handoff.
Governance, built in from the ground up.
When agents act on the brand's behalf, governance is the framework that defines what they can do, how much they decide independently, and how the brand's judgment guides every decision. Brands set the policies, standards, and boundaries every agent operates within. Those rules are set once and enforced on every transaction, without exception.
A global brand managing dozens of sub-brands across sixty markets might require that no placement runs adjacent to content flagged for specific sensitivity categories, that spend in any single market never exceeds a defined threshold without human approval, and that new surface types are reviewed before activation. Each brand and market operates under its own configuration, maintained independently.
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. Every transaction is logged in full and exportable to compliance, finance, and measurement systems.
Brand standards
Placement restrictions, audience guardrails, budget limits, brand-safety thresholds. Set per brand, per market, per surface.
Approval workflows
Gate the decisions that matter most — high-spend buys, new surface activations, creative changes — behind human approval.
Human in the loop
Start with full human approval. Move to defined guardrails. Scale to autonomous execution as confidence grows.
Audit trail
Every decision logged with full context: what was bought, where, at what price, and under what authorization. Read-only access for compliance teams.
Compliance and privacy
GDPR and CCPA compliance built into the architecture. First-party data stays the brand's. Clear data-processing agreements available.
AdCP, the open standard that makes it possible.
AdCP stands for the Advertising Context Protocol. It is the open standard that lets any buying agent transact with any sales agent across any surface. Built specifically for advertising, AdCP defines how inventory, 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 marketplace keeps growing, and why brands that connect through Scope3 are not dependent on any single platform's decisions about what inventory 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 surfaces as a named media channel.
Common questions about agentic advertising.
Agentic advertising is a model where AI agents act on behalf of brands and surface owners. A brand's buying agent carries the brand's objectives, standards, and budget. A surface owner's sales agent represents inventory, formats, audiences, and pricing. The two 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 agents on behalf of brands transact directly with sales agents on behalf of surface owners 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 and surface owners 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 or a surface owner). 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 brand agent (also called a buying agent) is an AI buyer that acts on behalf of a brand. It translates objectives, budgets, and brand standards into decisions, and transacts directly with surface-owner sales agents. The brand stays in command of the strategy and standards the agent operates under.
A sales agent represents a surface owner: a publisher, a platform, an AI assistant, a retailer, an out-of-home network. It exposes the inventory, formats, audiences, pricing, and terms the surface owner is willing to transact on, and negotiates directly with brand agents that come asking.
Agent-to-agent advertising is the transaction model behind agentic advertising. The brand's buying agent and the surface owner's sales agent communicate directly: discovering inventory, negotiating terms, executing the buy, and reporting outcomes. Every step happens between the two principals' agents.
Several types of agents operate today. A brand agent (also called a buying agent) acts on behalf of a brand. A sales agent (also called a seller 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 and surface owners run agentic advertising can connect through AdCP.
AdCP, the Advertising Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets any buying agent transact with any surface owner's sales agent. It defines how inventory, 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. Because AdCP is open, every new surface that adopts it becomes reachable to every buying agent that speaks the protocol.
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, placement restrictions, 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 can open a storefront so buying agents can find their inventory. Either way, the team will walk through onboarding at your scale.
Keep going.
Brands
The platform, the marketplace, and how it works in practice for brands and agencies.
Storefronts for surface owners
How surface owners merchandise, sell, and scale every ad opportunity through agent-facing 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.