AdCP vs. IAB Tech Lab: Inside programmatic advertising’s agentic AI standards showdown
Programmatic advertising is going through yet another period of transformation. This time from the era of web-based automation to the era of agentic AI-powered automation. Except there seem to be two competing philosophies for how AI agents and programmatic advertising should intersect.
On one side, there’s the Ad Context Protocol, which aims to create new standards native to AI agents. On the other, there’s IAB Tech Lab, which looks to augment and adapt its existing standards for AI agents through its Agentic Roadmap.
What’s been unclear is to what extent the two frameworks are compatible or competitive. In this video, programmatic experts — including executives from IAB Tech Lab and AdCP’s founding companies — weighed in on that at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, California.
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