4 Takeaways from the AdCP Launch

Last week, Scope3 (a Sharp Pen client) and a consortium of roughly 20 other companies launched AdCP, the Ad Context Protocol, a set of protocols to facilitate agentic advertising.

The launch webinar drew nearly 2,000 attendees who tuned in for a peek into the future of the industry. Here are four thoughts on the launch, both as an example of marketing best practices and as a harbinger of what’s to come for adtech.

1. The AdCP companies took an appropriately big swing.

Scope3 and team explicitly framed the shift to agentic as on par with the other transformational platform shifts of the past 20–30 years: print to digital, desktop to mobile, manual to programmatic.

This is exactly the level you want to communicate on if you are or want to be the industry leader: “We are inventing the future.”

Compare that to the usual adtech discourse: litigating Google’s crimes, debating technicalities, chasing marginal improvements. There’s a time for those more technical and, in the case of Google critiques, backward-looking discussions. But there’s a reason Scope3 CEO Brian O'Kelley has such a big audience. He takes swings that make everyone else blush.

2. The launch framed agentic advertising around outcomes, not just efficiency.

Adtech launches often emphasize efficiency: doing the same things a little better. Of course, efficiency is part of the shift to agents: LLMs should be able to communicate with each other and execute tasks more quickly and inexpensively than human media buyers and sellers.

But the real breakthrough of agentic advertising should be much deeper: making advertising more effective by solving the signal-loss problem between the sell side and buy side. In other words, when you improve communication so that the buy side deeply understands the content and audiences it’s buying, advertising should be more contextually relevant, more engaging, and more appropriately targeted to the audience, and performance should improve. 

The shift to agentic is not about saving 10% of wasted ad spend. It’s about growing the pie by making open internet advertising more effective, which should increase investment even as media companies face AI headwinds.

3. Everything in adtech comes back to the long war with the walled gardens.

Google, Meta, and AppLovin make advertising easy, and they sell outcomes. This is their extremely simple sales pitch: easy and effective. Or as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has essentially put it: “Tell us what outcomes you want, and we’ll deliver.” This is the grounding refrain of the Outcomes Era.

As Terry Kawaja pointed out during the webinar, there’s a reason AppLovin is worth more than the rest of the Lumascape combined. You cannot win if you’re selling complicated gobbledygook and writing dissertations to prove your inventory is actually better than AppLovin’s ROAS. 

None of the above means that all advertising will or should shift to an outcomes-based buying model or that all advertising is the same. The funnel still exists, and you sell different kinds of products with different marketing techniques.

But it does mean that one of the key tasks for agentic advertising is to help the open internet compete on these terms: becoming easier and more performant. The speakers consistently presented this as among agentic advertising’s key value propositions, and that is the right move conceptually and rhetorically. But more will need to be said, debated, and demonstrated about how agents drive better marketing outcomes in practice.

4. The dawn of agentic shows just how powerful B2B marketing is.

We’re witnessing the early days of a new status quo in adtech, and this incipient stage shows how big an impact marketing has on the pecking order.

It doesn’t matter if your product is superb. If you’re invisible, you will lose to companies with similar or worse products — purely because everyone knows they’re innovating on agentic while you’re on the sidelines.

Scope3 and its allies got nearly 2,000 people to sign up for a webinar on a Wednesday morning. That success is in no small part attributable to Brian O’Kelley’s LinkedIn presence. He’s all in on LinkedIn as the driver of communications in 2025, posting daily on the platform, facilitating conversations about agentic advertising, and reinforcing the tie between agentic and Scope3 in the minds of adtech CEOs, advertisers, and publishers.

If you’re reading this and you also want to lead adtech in this emerging new era, don’t sit on the sidelines or bet that the brilliance of your product alone will help you compete. You need to be out there. Practice CEO evangelism. Join the conversation.