The case for agentic advertising. Programmatic bought scale by flattening every media environment into an interchangeable impression; agent-to-agent negotiation puts that context back, making a direct conversation between advertiser and publisher economical at any deal size. Why the data we already manage is now context for AI, what still limits both sides of the market, and the three things agentic advertising has to deliver.

For twenty years the industry chose between context and scale: the insertion order carried the full conversation between a media company and an advertiser but was rationed to a handful of accounts, while programmatic scaled by removing that conversation entirely. Agentic advertising restores it at programmatic volume. This session covers what changes in the negotiation layer, why execution stays on the pipes publishers already run, why a seller agent is worth exactly as much as the audience data behind it, and what Optable is bringing to market.

Many of the largest players in the industry continue to consolidate toward end-to-end, owned infrastructure, and recent moves in the identity space have amplified the pressure to go all-in on a single platform. This means brands might not have the right access to best-in-breed technology for their unique marketing needs and instead need to use the "full stack" from larger firms. Instead of making that choice or shelling out resources to build every layer in-house, Goodway Group chose a different path.

In this fireside chat, Optable CEO Vlad Stesin sits down with Goodway Group CEO Paul Frampton-Calero to unpack how Goodway built Passport One, its proprietary data and intelligence layer, on top of Optable's identity infrastructure. They'll discuss how this initiative has given Goodway an agentic advantage without giving up control of its data. Expect coverage of the results behind Passport One across multiple success stories.

Agents are shipping faster than the buy side can absorb them, onto a stack chosen under old incentives and run by teams trained to pull the levers the agents now pull. Shiv Gupta (U of Digital) and Jay Friedman (CartographAI) on what agency buyers should re-evaluate, and what a buying team is for.

Optable's position is that the identity, audience, and pricing data publishers hold is now context for AI, and that making it reachable by agents opens up what programmatic could not. That claim is getting tested across planning, activation, and measurement as buyers look to connect their own data into a non-standardized breadth of publisher signals.

Matt Emans has argued publicly that waiting for clean data is a mistake, that agents work on the spotty data most teams already have, and that measuring often beats measuring perfectly. Hold that against what buyers keep asking publishers for: exposure returned at the level of campaigns and audiences, resolved to the buyer's own identity, which is the level channel models are too coarse to see. Vlad Stesin and Matt Emans are joined by Shukmei Wong, SVP of Omnichannel Media at Involved Media, who brings the agency and buyer view of where that value actually lands. The three cover what agents can achieve today, what that means for brand and agency data, where measurement practice goes from here, and how teams move forward on the view that continuous improvement beats waiting for perfect signals.

Agentic advertising needs shared rules of the road, and the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Ad Management Protocol (AAMP) is built to provide them. AAMP is often described as just a programmatic layer, but it covers the whole workflow: planning, discovery, transaction and reconciliation. Tony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, explains how the framework works, why Tech Lab built it and what it supports today. Derek Nicol, SVP of Ad Technology & Systems at Paramount, then joins him to share how a major TV company is approaching agentic, and what buyers and sellers should know as AAMP shapes how media gets planned and bought.

AI is already changing how media gets bought. Ads are showing up inside chat interfaces, open-web traffic is shifting toward premium publishers, and buyers are starting to hand campaign work to software agents. Yory Wurmser of EMARKETER explains how agentic buying differs from the programmatic setup you run today. Using EMARKETER's forecasts, Yory shows why it could reach almost every category of digital ad spend, from search and display to CTV and live sports. The session compares the two main frameworks, and covers what's holding adoption back, including data readiness and the lack of shared standards. You'll leave knowing what to put in place before agentic buying reaches your media plan.

Programmatic proved machines could buy media in real time at enormous scale. It also squeezed publisher yields, added layers of middlemen that never went away, and left buyers with a supply chain they couldn't see into. Agentic buying is a chance to keep the scale and lose the rest, but the technology alone won't make that happen.

AdExchanger's Anthony Vargas moderates Rio Longacre of Credera and Bosko Milekic of Optable on what it will take. They'll cover how buyer and seller agents actually talk to each other, and what changes inside an agency when the brief goes machine-to-machine. They'll also compare two paths: automating the existing maze, or going direct. And they'll explain where MCP, AdCP, and IAB Tech Lab fit. Expect a clear view of what to carry forward and what not to build twice.

Join us for an interactive session where the audience shapes the industry insight. We'll ask a few quick questions about agentic advertising: what's actually shipped, what's being delivered, and what's getting in the way. Publishers, agencies, and advertisers in the room answer live, with results appearing on screen as they come in.

Gaming has the audience brand advertisers want and almost none of the addressability they expect everywhere else. Reaching players has meant a separate buy on separate terms, sitting outside the rest of the plan. Unity set out to close that gap. James Prudhomme (Unity), Bora Beran (Google Cloud), and Marc-Olivier Thibault (Optable) walk through how Unity resolved its player base into an audience brands can plan and activate next to their CTV and web buys, and what it took to get there without moving player data out of Unity's environment.

Your most valuable audience signal, the behavior and identity you understand better than anyone else does, is also the hardest thing you sell. It sits in direct deals and custom builds because it was never packaged in a form a buyer could act on without a phone call. Crystal Jacques is joined by Heather Carver of tvScientific by Pinterest, Dave Lundell of Hearst, and Amanda Martin of Mediavine. Each sits on audience intent, behavior, and identity signal that buyers want. Each has had to decide how to describe it and what to charge for it before anyone on the other side could act. The session is about that work, and about why doing it once answers an RFP and an agentic buyer without a second build.

Andrew Dumas brings the day together: what we heard on stage and from the room's live survey, where agentic advertising is already working, and what publishers, agencies, and brands should do next. Then we head up to the terrace.