The IAB Tech Lab Agent Registry went live on March 1, 2026. It is the trust layer of agentic advertising — the infrastructure through which AI agents discover inventory, evaluate opportunities, negotiate terms, and execute ad buys without waiting for a human to click “approve.”
Three months later, the registry has ten entries.
Nine companies. All operating under Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol. Two SSPs — PubMatic and Equativ — meaning supply-side infrastructure is already agent-readable. Amazon brought the biggest buyer agent. Optable, which just published a publisher readiness assessment, registered itself and then told everyone else they’re failing.
From Protocol to Product
A month ago, I wrote about the “three percent problem” — agentic web traffic as a rounding error on the $294.6 billion digital ad market. The protocols existed. The market didn’t care.
The market is starting to care. AAMP 2.0 shipped transaction-ready Buyer and Seller Agent SDKs — not specifications, not whitepapers, but software that can plan, negotiate, and execute ad buys within standardized frameworks. Kochava opened StationOne to public beta — nineteen specialized agentic skills running against Trade Desk, DV360, and Amazon DSP. PMG wired its Alli operating system into the AAMP buyer agent architecture. Criteo piped $4 billion in annual media spend through OpenAI’s MCP server integrations.
AAMP 3.0 is expected in July.
The Cannes Test
Cannes Lions opens Monday. The agentic advertising conversation will be everywhere — but not from the direction publishers expected.
Publicis is buying LiveRamp for $2.2 billion, absorbing the identity infrastructure that publishers relied on as neutral. The conversation at Cannes isn’t whether this is a good deal. It’s who should own the infrastructure that powers audience targeting, measurement, and data collaboration — and the industry just watched the answer become “the largest agency holding company in the world.”
OpenAI’s chief revenue officer takes the Palais stage to pitch the shift from a “media operating model” to an “intelligence operating model.” ChatGPT users convert at 1.5× the rate of other referral channels. Amazon is showcasing its agentic AI advertising stack. Digiday’s pre-festival “In/Out” list: OpenAI courting advertisers is in. The ad tech stack is out.
Meanwhile, Optable’s readiness assessment finds publishers with data authentication rates below 10% qualify as “not ready.” Content metadata must align with IAB Content Taxonomy — a technical requirement, not a recommendation. Thin metadata causes agents to misclassify content, “leading to over-blocking.” In an agentic world, illegible inventory is invisible inventory.
The Independence Question
D/Cipher+ is People Inc’s most valuable technology asset. It drives over half of direct digital ad revenue. Its OpenAI-powered contextual targeting delivers double the click-through rate of cookie-based alternatives. Its performance guarantee has never been triggered.
It was built as a proprietary system — deliberately walled, deliberately independent. The wall is the pitch: D/Cipher doesn’t need cookies, doesn’t need third-party identity, doesn’t need the open programmatic stack that Google is dismantling. Independence is the moat.
The agentic advertising stack being built on the other side of that wall now has transaction-ready SDKs, a working sandbox, buyer agents from Amazon and PMG, and a protocol version shipping monthly. The question it poses to every walled system is simple: when the buyer’s agent can autonomously discover, evaluate, and transact with every registered seller, what happens to inventory that isn’t registered?
It doesn’t get blocked. It doesn’t get attacked. It gets skipped.
This isn’t a crisis. D/Cipher’s business is growing at double digits. The registry has ten entries out of an industry with hundreds of ad-tech vendors. AAMP is infrastructure looking for adoption, not adoption looking for infrastructure.
But the festival that opens Monday is the first major industry gathering where agentic advertising has working products, not just protocols. What People Inc says — or doesn’t say — about where D/Cipher fits in that architecture will matter more than any announcement about click-through rates.
The registry is open. Registration is free.