One address for AdCP.

The Record Is Not the Relationship

Season 2's seventh poll asked who owns the customer relationship when an agent chooses the brand, and the four options turn out to be four different senses of the word own. The consumer owns the intent, the brand owns the fulfilment, the agent platform owns the interface, the data holder owns the record — and only one of those can be exercised without anyone's permission. The week's term is Interface Capture: the party that receives the intent accumulates the relationship whoever fulfils the transaction and whoever signs the contract, because it is the only party that can open the next conversation without asking. The test is not who was present at the sale, it is who can start the next one unilaterally. Shopify publishes the list of checkout blocks that do not load in an agentic direct checkout, and it is loyalty, the consent block and the client-side pixel — the merchant's entire apparatus for turning a buyer into a customer. Meanwhile the Agentic Commerce Protocol does hand the merchant the buyer's real name, email, phone and address. The record arrives; the permission does not. Booking Holdings now files that mechanism in its own risk factors, two federal appeals courts decided the compellability and the defensibility of the position a day apart in August 2026 and the interface won both, and AdCP's own data-protection analysis assigns the first-party role to the interface holder rather than the brand. My vote went to the brand, which is the party with the best claim in equity and the worst claim in mechanism, and I say why I am not changing it.

The Layer That Didn't Ship

In 2025 the industry agreed it needed a shared layer for exchanging user context between agents, LiveRamp proposed one, donated it to IAB Tech Lab in late 2025, and it was renamed Agentic Audiences by early 2026 and filed under AAMP. Read at the repository rather than the press release, that layer has eleven commits since its creation in October 2025, no releases and no tags, two pull requests still open, a spec still headed Draft v0.1, and a wire format string that still carries the retired name. Its one working integration — the OpenRTB community extension on Segment.ext.aa and the Prebid.js RTD module — shipped inside a four-week window between March 22 and April 14, 2026 and has had nothing added since. Meanwhile the job got done twice somewhere else: AdCP's Trusted Match carries contextual embeddings at serve time against a 50ms provider timeout inside the router's latency budget, and AAMP's in-bidstream runtime ARTF reached v1.0 on July 20, 2026 with gRPC bid mutations under tmax. Neither references the other's embedding vocabulary. The mechanism is not a governance failure, it is a latency budget: an embedding is only worth carrying if it arrives before the auction closes, so every decision about dimensions, quantisation and timeout behaviour is a property of a runtime, and whoever holds the clock ends up holding the vocabulary. A neutral layer donated to a standards body is not the same thing as a layer that ships. The general test, applied here to AdCP as well, is commits, tagged releases and whether the one integration that exists is still maintained — and it closes with a checkable prediction about what would prove Agentic Audiences is maintained rather than parked.

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.

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.

Notes from the Implementer Seat

What running a live AdCP signals agent teaches you that reading the spec never will. Revised September 2026: a privacy gap I filed against Trusted Match shipped in AdCP v3.1.22 — on stricter terms than I proposed, in a maintainer PR rather than mine — and two threads listed here as open proposals have since closed as completed.

Agentic Advertising Protocols: A Unified Map of What's Next

Ad tech's standards run in silos, and 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. Revised September 2026: the layer this map named UCP had already been donated to IAB Tech Lab and renamed Agentic Audiences before publication, the roadmap belongs to one body of two now in open conflict, and the serve-time matching job the map reserved for a separate layer now runs inside AdCP's Trusted Match.

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.

AdCP: The Open Standard for Agentic Advertising

Connect once. Operate anywhere.