Agentic Commerce & Protocols.
AdCP, UCP, MCP, and A2A read as commercial infrastructure: the wire formats, handshakes, and deal loops buyer and seller agents need before either can transact.
The canonical first-read.
AdCP: The Open Standard for Agentic Advertising
Connect once. Operate anywhere.
Read essay →- 01Aug 2026
Negotiating the Nouns
Season 2's fourth poll asked what buyer and seller agents will negotiate hardest, and 55 ballots produced the tightest finish of the season: Success criteria at 34%, Price at 32%, Audience definitions and Liability at 16% each. Read as a block, two-thirds of the room said the hardest negotiation is no longer the number — it's the nouns around the number. That's the week's term: Negotiating the Nouns. Automated negotiation is mostly semantic negotiation wearing a price tag. Price is the one term on the ballot machines already clear — fifteen years of real-time auctions settled it to the millisecond — and it stayed easy only because every other term was held still by convention: the audience was a list name on an insertion order, success was handled at the QBR, liability was boilerplate nobody read. An agent can't execute ambiguity. Every term has to parse before a dollar moves, so the negotiation migrates from the price line into the definitions — what counts, whose count settles it, over what window, against what baseline. My vote went to Success criteria, and it won by two points; the 32% who picked Price weren't wrong either, because every noun left unsettled eventually presents its invoice as a price dispute.
- 02Aug 2026
Nobody Sells an Outcome
Season 2's third poll asked what autonomous buying agents will ultimately buy, and 73 ballots produced the clearest majority of the season: Outcomes at 57%, with Impressions at 27%, Audiences at 8%, Attention at 6%. The room voted for the one unit on the list that nobody can currently sell, because selling an outcome means warranting it, and warranting it means pricing the failure case. That pricing function — Outcome Underwriting — is the institution the whole result quietly depends on: a definition both sides accept, a measurement both sides trust, a settlement window, and someone who pays when the outcome doesn't happen. The first three are measurement work. The fourth is capital. Outcome optimization exists inside the walled gardens; outcome insurance does not. Owned loops reprice faster and sometimes carry action-level variance, but no scaled platform guarantees the advertiser's business result. My vote went to Outcomes anyway — for where the market ends, not for what's tradable now — and the 27% who voted Impressions weren't nostalgic; they named the only unit with a working settlement stack, which is why it gets demoted to the receipt rather than killed.
- 03Jul 2026
AdCP vs AAMP: The Retrofit and the Greenfield
Two agentic advertising standards shipped within 48 hours of each other in late July — AdCP tagged v3.1.8, IAB Tech Lab announced AAMP 2.3. The trade press calls it a war and mislabels the battlefield. Read at the repository level, the real difference isn't altitude (both negotiate deals; both touch the impression path). It's ancestry: AAMP retrofits agents onto advertising's existing rails — OpenDirect, OpenRTB, the ad servers and DSPs already in production — while AdCP writes a new campaign-lifecycle protocol with trust in the wire format. Every claim verified against the repos and specs, both directions, with the press-release-vs-repository deltas printed for each side.
- 04Jul 2026
The One Standard That Clears the Deal
Season 1's last poll asks which standard matters most in five years: Identity, Measurement, Agent Protocols, or Trust & Accountability. This essay's answer: three of the four only reduce friction — a market can run without them, just more slowly and at more risk. Only one clears or blocks the transaction outright. That's the test that actually separates a standard from infrastructure, and it's independent of which option the room eventually picks.
- 05Jul 2026
Measurement for Agentic Commerce
The agent doesn't click, doesn't see ads, and buys anyway. A breaks/survives/emerges triage of commerce measurement, and the instrumentation to build now.
- 06Jul 2026
The Prebid Sales Agent: AdCP's Sell Side Lands in the Wrapper
AdCP's sell side is a deal machine beside the wrapper, not inside it — the architecture, the deal loop, five publisher decisions, the caveats nobody prints.
- 07Jul 2026
When the Buyer's Agent Meets the Seller's Agent
A natural-language brief in Claude became live CTV spend through a protocol handshake. Ten surfaces are becoming agentic counterparties — but autonomy and interoperability are inversely correlated, so far, and the consolidation ledger shows exactly what agents are hungry for.
- 08Jun 2026
Do We Still Need Standards When Machines Understand Context?
The crowd voted 'more than ever' — but the real question isn't whether AI kills standards. It's which standards survive when meaning goes to zero and accountability becomes the scarce thing.
- 09Jun 2026
Notes from the Implementer Seat
What running a live AdCP signals agent teaches you that reading the spec never will.
- 10Jun 2026
Signal Containerization: The Next Abstraction Layer for Agentic Advertising
A framework for packaging buyer intent, semantic meaning, provenance, privacy policy, activation rules, and measurement logic into executable advertising signal containers.
- 11Mar 2026
Agentic Advertising Protocols: A Unified Map of What's Next
Ad tech's standards run in silos. The Agentic Era makes that gap impossible to ignore — a map of how OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, Deals API, and GPP each extend into the agentic stack, and the missing layer (UCP) that turns them into one coordinated system.
- 12Feb 2026
AI Agents in Ads need a "Common Language"
Vector alignment as practical infrastructure — projectors, capability discovery, and the handshake between buyer and seller agents.
- 13Feb 2026
The Missing Link in Ad Tech: How UCP & AdCP Are Finally Unifying the "Alphabet Soup"
How UCP and AdCP retire ad-tech's "Tower of Babel" — Architect (intent) and Engineer (math) of the agentic stack.
- 14Apr 2025
MCP. A2A. OMG. The New ABCs of Advertising AI
Model Context Protocol meets Agent-to-Agent. How AIs talk to tools and each other to ship DCO at machine speed.