In June, I agreed with IAB Tech Lab’s Anthony Katsur that 2026 is agentic advertising’s “crawl” year and 2027 is “walk.” And I said most of what had been promoted was better classed as experiments, tests, PR, or all three.

Three months later, we have new developments, but my guidance is still mostly the same.

In August, Scope3’s Brian O’Kelley, author of the AdCP protocol, was asked whether a binding, signed record of an agentic transaction exists and works in production today.

His answer: “Exist yes. Work yes. Active in production at scale — not yet.”

In the same piece, pubX CEO Andrew Mole said his company is facilitating US$2,000-US$3,000 a day in gross media across a handful of publishers, and not continuously.

Also in August, Butler/Till and iHeartMedia told Digiday about a four-week audio pilot in which two agents, one built by the agency and one by iHeart, negotiated just under US$10,000 of streaming audio and podcast media directly over MCP, with no SSP in between. Butler/Till says CPMs came in roughly 40% under the client’s direct-buy benchmark.

And PubMatic told AdExchanger it has completed more than 1,000 agentic direct-sold deals and about 30 agentic programmatic campaigns, half of them packaging publisher first-party data through Optable’s seller agent.

In addition, A Media Operator conducted a publisher roll call of experiments and pilots. Vox conducted an AdCP pilot buy in June with Boostr, Raptive has run low-volume transactions with Scope3 and PubMatic, Paradium.ai (the former Arena Group) closed its first agentic direct IO off its Encore AI data platform, and Hearst put an agentic layer on its Aura IQ audience tool to build custom audiences from RFPs.

Mike Nuzzo, head of data solutions, was candid about actual trading: “I don’t think that the AdCP protocol is there yet.”

A check on the standards reveals AdCP stays “experimental” until 4.0 in early 2027 while IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP is at version 2.3 with a full semantic baseline promised for Q3 and authentication and verification “two to three releases” out, with no date. WPP won’t publish findings from its video buyer agent until early 2027. 

So the shape of the first stage of the agentic market is emerging even if the timelines for standards and real demand are still fuzzy: There’s a publisher’s seller agent, a buyer’s agent, a deal that is usually direct, and humans approving at both ends (and overseeing along the way).

What got clearer is where deal demand is heading, and it isn’t the open auction. 

Every operator quoted this summer pointed at direct IOs, programmatic guaranteed, PMPs, and sponsorships, aka the deals that take four to 12 weeks to close by e-mail today.

Rio Longacre of Credera (Omnicom’s consulting arm) listed homepage takeovers, sponsorships, live sports, CTV guarantees, custom audience packages, and cross-publisher deals as the transactions likely to move to agent negotiation first. Mediavine’s Charlie Morris expects agencies to fund agentic tests out of direct-buy budgets, not programmatic. And Mole’s clock for real spend is Q1 2027, when annual programmatic commitments come up for renewal.

Google is not waiting. 

Buyer Direct, which debuted at Cannes, is in beta with Google Ad Manager, enabling agency accounts to book direct deals inside Google’s own interface with programmatic-style workflow but no DSP or SSP fees, for display and online video. Gamera’s Gareth Glaser made the case in AdExchanger that with 95% of online publishers on GAM, Google doesn’t need a new protocol to win the direct-deal use case the AdCP camp is chasing; he called it “plan B after AdX.”

So what changes for publishers? 

I think the three recommendations I made in June are still right:

1. Be legible to new buyers.

2. Help write the rules.

3. Experiment with seller agents. I agree with Raptive’s Ryan Maynard, who recommends building your own seller agent rather than letting an SSP or data vendor bundle your inventory into one-to-many packages.

I’ll be continuing to watch AdCP 4.0 and AAMP’s verification releases, whether Buyer Direct scales, and whether anyone reports a six-figure agentic month or anything close. 

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Banner art: Adobe stock image by InfiniteFlow.

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