AgenticAdvertising.org (AAO) has launched an Australian chapter to advance open standards for AI-powered advertising, as the industry explores how autonomous AI agents could change the way marketers buy media and publishers sell inventory.
Announced on Thursday, the chapter will focus on improving interoperability between advertising platforms and helping Australian brands, agencies, publishers and technology companies adopt agentic advertising.
The initiative will be co-led by Andrew Gilbert, country manager ANZ at pubX, and June Cheung, head of JAPAC at Apostra.
Founding members include Pete Barry, VP of commerce and audience solutions at PubMatic; Adam Krass, product lead at Mutinex; Dylan Dharmadasa, GM of product at WPP Media; and Paul Oyama, head of supply and agentic trading at News Australia.
The launch comes as the advertising industry investigates how AI agents could automate parts of media planning, buying and selling. However, accessing inventory across independent publishers and offline channels can still require multiple integrations, workflows and reporting systems, creating additional complexity for advertisers and media owners.
AAO’s Australian chapter will support the adoption of the organisation’s Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), an open standard designed to allow AI agents involved in advertising transactions to communicate through a common framework.
The protocol aims to standardise how agents discover advertising inventory, exchange proposals, execute transactions and report results, potentially reducing the number of integrations required to connect buyers and sellers.
For marketers, the approach could make it easier to evaluate and access a broader range of media opportunities beyond individual global advertising platforms, while giving publishers another way to present the value of their audiences and inventory.
“Agentic advertising hands control back to brands. The brand sets the objectives and the boundaries, and its agents go and find the media that fits,” Cheung said.
“For Australian advertisers, that reaches far more of the local market than a single global buying stack ever made practical, which is good for brands and good for the independent publishers they want to support.”
Gilbert said Australian publishers offer valuable audiences and advertising environments, but accessing their inventory can be more complex than buying through a single global platform.
“A shared protocol can help level the playing field, making it easier for buyers and sellers to connect while ensuring Australian media has a voice in shaping the future of agentic advertising,” he said.
For agencies, greater interoperability could also help media teams assess opportunities and demonstrate the performance of their investments.
“Our responsibility is to ensure clients’ media investments deliver measurable outcomes,” Dharmadasa said.
“Greater interoperability could help us evaluate a broader range of media opportunities more efficiently and better demonstrate their performance.”
Meanwhile, Oyama said agentic advertising could give publishers more opportunities to communicate the value of their audiences, content and formats, rather than relying solely on the information available within an individual ad request.
“Agentic advertising could enable publishers to better communicate the value of their audiences, content and formats, helping buyers identify opportunities that align with their objectives,” he said.
Barry said shared infrastructure would be important to making agentic advertising work at scale, with open standards potentially reducing the need for multiple integrations between advertising systems.
The Australian chapter will also contribute to discussions around transparency, accountability and human oversight in agentic advertising, including AAO’s Embedded Human Judgment framework, which is designed to incorporate governance into agentic workflows.
