Media Buying Briefing: Rival trade bodies emerge to contend programmatic’s future

The difference between the camps might seem academic. But their emergence highlights ad industry divisions that could shape the future of the business.

The AAO bills itself as the “trade association for agentic advertising”. It’s the non-profit behind AdCP, a technical protocol used by agencies like Omnicom and Butler/Till to develop and run AI agents capable of handling programmatic media buys.

The group’s first annual general meeting (AGM) is set to take place May 6. At the event, members will elect a board of directors drawn equally from agencies, publishers, advertisers and ad tech companies. Its founders, which include Scope3’s Brian O’Kelley and consultancy Ebiquity, frame the group as a disruptor to the industry’s traditional powerbrokers. 

It follows the public launch of the IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Governance Council late last month. Its 40 member companies meet on a biweekly basis and include Paramount, The Trade Desk, Zynga, Omnicom, Hearst, Horizon, Dentsu, Amazon Ads, WPP Media and Yahoo. Attached brands include Bayer and Hershey’s, Digiday confirmed.

“It’s a healthy representation of the industry collectively,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. On the agenda are issues such as fraud and supply chain inefficiencies. While AI and agentic tools might be discussed, Katsur said they’d be dealt with as particular use cases cropped up.

Omnicom Media’s chief media officer, Ben Hovaness, said that bid duplication is an early focus: “That is arguably the single biggest unnecessary cost in the whole ecosystem that effectively adds no value in the way that it gets abused.”

AdCP vs. IAB Tech Lab: Inside programmatic advertising’s agentic AI standards showdown

The Tech Lab is seen as a neutral arbiter among industry players. As well as developing cross-sector standards, it’s responsible for stewarding Open RTB, the framework for connecting demand- and supply-side platforms. Unlike AAO, the Governance Council is an advisory body intended to fix what Hovaness dubs the industry’s “partial coordination failure.”  Per its 1,100-word charter, which was authored by Katsur with Hovaness, it’ll make recommendations but not write new standards.

Plans to form the Programmatic Governance Council began after a falling-out among ad tech players over changes Prebid made to transaction IDs (TIDs) last August. That move was criticized by Tech Lab’s Katsur and sparked off an acrimonious intra-industry debate.

The great TID controversy takes another turn as Prebid moves to clarify its position 

After an air-clearing “town hall” style meeting held at Magnite’s New York headquarters in October, the Council was formed with the intention of healing that rift, according to Katsur. “If we want to solve some of these issues, including the TID issue, we need to have all [the] principals in the room,” he said.

The AAO aligned itself with Prebid’s camp in January, in a collaboration to develop a Prebid Sales Agent for publishers.

Key players aren’t just concerned with the recent past, but with the future of programmatic and the open web. Although overall programmatic spending on digital display is set to reach $203.04 billion by the end of this year, the rate of growth is slowing; eMarketer projects that overall growth will have fallen from 17.4% in 2024 to 11% in 2027.

Furthermore, the share of that spending flowing to publishers on the open web has shrunk over recent years. By 2027, eMarketer estimates that just 18.9% of programmatic display investment will fall outside the walled gardens, down from 23.3% in 2023.

Hovaness argued that if the industry doesn’t act soon, that descent will continue until it meets the horizon. “Unless we do something to improve the overall productivity of the ecosystem in efficiency and effectiveness terms, that decline will continue,” he said. “I don’t think that would be good for our clients long term… Starting this body is one way that we hope, over time, we can reverse that trend by stripping unnecessary costs out of the programmatic ecosystem.”

The Council and the AAO’s philosophical differences concern how advertisers, agencies and ad tech should collectively respond to that decline. The Council’s way forward focuses on big-tent collaboration to reduce inefficiencies in the existing plumbing of programmatic and in its flagship OpenRTB infrastructure.

AAO advocates suggest the Tech Lab is ill-suited to lead the ad industry into its AI-fueled transition into the agentic era, pointing to long-held concerns about the potential for players such as Google and Meta to wield outsize influence. And some question if legacy standards, such as OpenRTB will continue to apply in an era when media buying is becoming predominantly agentic.

One AAO backer, who asked to remain unnamed, summarized the group’s disruptor ambition: “If OpenRTB isn’t valuable [in the agentic internet era], why are you paying a trade association whose only job is to steward a protocol that you may not be using anymore?”

By contrast, the AAO’s approach looks to build a system that serves agentic architecture and enables advertisers and publishers to cut waste by eliminating middlemen and established infrastructure with AI. Such efforts, especially when set alongside the convergence of SSPs and DSPs, look destined to reduce buyers’ reliance on OpenRTB – the foundational protocol that IAB Tech Lab manages.

Early media-buying tests like those conducted by Omnicom are designed to use AdCP to do just that, per the holdco’s chief technology officer, Paolo Yuvienco’s comments to analysts in last week’s earnings call. The anonymous source quipped: “If you don’t need OpenRTB, why do we need Tech Lab?”

However, sources point out that while leadership of the respective bodies may have traded barbs over their contributions to the evolution of online advertising, they are not necessarily competitive, and it’s not altogether unprecedented to have multiple standards bodies. As one source put it, they are “intertwined.”

“We do have active engagement with the IAB and Tech Lab,” added the source within the AAO. “It’s not as if we are ignoring what the other is doing… We have the same goal, but we haven’t settled on the best way to do it.”

Color by numbers

Relative to other media, out of home can sometimes be overlooked – after all, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) it represents only 2.3% of total media spend. But thanks to advances in digital OOH, the industry in 2025 grew its total haul 3.6% to $9.46 billion. The digital portion grew 10.5% over 2024 and now accounts for 36.3% of total OOH revenue. –Michael Bürgi

Takeoff & landing

• Several holding companies released Q1 earnings last week. Let’s start with WPP, which delivered another quarter of moribund numbers, with total revenue and net revenue both down just under 7%. WPP Media revenue was down 8.5%, global integrated agencies were down 6.4% and specialist agencies a less-terrible -2.3%. Meanwhile, flush with IPG agencies, Omnicom looked somewhat healthier, with its Q1 revenue hitting $6.24 billion (core operations, meaning the businesses it plans to keep, hit $5.6 billion) and margins increasing to 14.8% (from 12.4% a year ago). Finally, on a much smaller level, Stagwell‘s Q1 revenue 8% to $704 million while net revenue grew 4% to $585 million, and margins hitting 15%.
• VaynerX launched yet another new agency, Tamara Group (named after founder Gary Vaynerchuk’s mother, who he quipped he liked more than his dad) which will deal in mainly experiential work tied around relevance and attention. It will be run by Ryan Harwood who also serves as CEO of Gallery Media Group, and initial clients include Ulta Beauty, Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, and Method.
• Account moves: Omnicom’s Hearts & Science landed smartphone and automaker Xiaomi‘s media business in China … January Digital won media AOR duties for suncare brand Supergoop! 
• Personnel moves: Dentsu made two executive moves under Americas CEO Beth-Ann Kaminkow: Christena Pyle was named chief client experience officer, moving from chief of community and culture; and Steve Albany was named evp of growth & partnerships, coming over from WPP’s Open X where he led global creative partnerships for Coca Cola Co. Separately, iProspect North American CEO Liz Rutgersson stepped down from her post, and has not said where she is moving to. … Generation Media, a British agency that’s expanding in the U.S., hired two vp’s to lead client partnerships: Caity Press, who comes from Beacon Media Group, and Zach Smith who joins from a vp post at PowerPhyl Media Solutions.

Direct quote

“Everybody else that’s talented like me and gets it, is only building to sell, and that’s really unfortunate. I think that the banking DNA has really eaten up the marketing DNA of our industry … I think there’s a lot more room for real competitors of [VaynerX], which I would cheer for, because I think we’d have a healthier industry, and I think brands would not be so disgruntled. And I hope to see people come along that scare me.”

— Gary Vaynerchuk, announcing the launch of the Tamara Group at Possible last week.

Speed reading

• Missed the Possible conference in Miami last week? Digiday caught up with a raft of speakers and executives in attendance and got their thoughts on generative AI, the economy and how marketers see consumers (and vice versa).
• Seb Joseph and Jess Davies listened into Omnicom’s Q1 earnings report and picked up on details about how the holding company is deploying AI agents to buy media.
• And in his continuing series looking at media alternatives to aligning marketer messaging around this summer’s World Cup, Sam Bradley dug into the audio and podcast options.
• Michael Bürgi caught up with Boathouse CEO John Connors to parse through the agency’s latest CMO study, as seen through the eyes of their CEOs.