A few weeks ago, agent-to-agent ad buying still sounded like a 2027 story. Then on April 28, Omnicom got on its Q1 earnings call and said it had already executed live agent-to-agent media buys for several clients. 

CEO John Wren told investors ad tech intermediaries take a “toll” and going more directly to publishers is “an objective, and it’s something we’re investing in.” Head of AI Paolo Yuvienco said the framework runs on the Ad Context Protocol and that Omnicom proved the infrastructure out before its investor day in March. Acxiom Real ID, picked up in the IPG deal, is what makes the shorter supply chain possible.

Very notable that one of the advertising holdcos is telling Wall Street it plans to go around DSPs and SSPs where it can. 

Other news from the last three weeks tells the same story. The Trade Desk launched Koa Agents in alpha on April 21 with Stagwell as its first partner. Koa runs on Open Agentic Kit, Trade Desk’s own framework, which is separate from the IAB Tech Lab and AdCP protocols. Stagwell expects to put Koa in front of select clients in closed beta this summer.

On the measurement front, Hershey announced it’s rebuilding marketing mix modelling with Mutinex (powered by Claude and Gemini) and Tracer. Vinny Rinaldi, vice president of media and marketing technology at Hersh, said: “We were getting the full read of 2024 [data] midway through 2025 while we were planning for 2026.” 

Hershey will run MMM monthly across its full portfolio rather than three to five times a year on a handful of brands and expects a 4% to 5% lift on the more than US$2 billion it spends across media and trade marketing. Very notable that for Hershey, quarterly isn’t fast enough anymore.

PMG (the agency for Apple, Nike, and others) plugged the IAB Tech Lab Agent Registry into its Alli operating system, with PubMatic, Google, Amazon, and Equativ agents now callable. IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur called 2026 a “crawl” year and 2027 the “walk” year. Most agents in production today are read-only because the prospect of hallucinated CPMs is a real problem.

On the standards side, AdCP 3.0 shipped April 22. Brian O’Kelley is putting the protocol under independent governance. The fight over standards has settled into AAMP and the Agent Registry on one side, AdCP and AAO on the other, and The Trade Desk doing its own thing. 

These are very interesting developments, though I still think there are a lot of barriers to work through (like process escalation, policy, error handling, security, fraud prevention, etc.) before we see widespread adoption. 

That said, while I think 2026 will remain focused on pilot programmes, I also think it’s time for publishers to get more tangible about how they plan to accept and govern machine-to-machine buys across the ad stack when we get there. 

Get your audience attributes, deal IDs, and inventory metadata in shape — when we do get to real demand, agentic buyers will seek and value what they can read, so quality signals are vital. And if you’re already building or piloting agents for inventory trading, I’d really, really love to hear from you.

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