I was reading this post and thinking about the sports sponsorship world. There is so much selling infrastructure around sports sponsorships because the deals are large and tend to focus on the main things like jersey/kit/stadium placements etc. But there are tons of other touch points across a sports teams media footprint that if sports teams inside (or even across) leagues all participated in an agentic sponsorship system it would possibly open up a host of new revenue opportunities for them.
Exactly. We've been having some fascinating discussions with creator marketplaces, including some NIL ones, and seems like this is a no brainer. If you know anybody who'd like to explore this, send them my way!
The comparison to finance is particularly apt, but it highlights a critical structural difference: fungibility. In public markets, returns are homogeneous: two holders of the same asset earn the same return over the same period. Advertising doesn’t share that property. The value of a given impression, platform, or channel can vary dramatically across advertisers.
Because returns are heterogeneous, prices in advertising are a much noisier signal of value than asset prices are in financial markets. As a result, in a lower-friction advertising ecosystem, measurement and attribution increasingly become the binding constraint on efficiency rather than access, scale, or liquidity.
We're moving from a world of buying based on proxies to buying based on proprietary intelligence. The real winners in this low-friction world won't just be the ones with the lowest costs, but the ones who have replaced generic third-party signals with their own high-fidelity measurement loops.
I’m glad you finally see this distinction between allocation and valuation. It’s why Rubicon Project back in 2014 purchased iSocket and ShinyAds to automate the outside the bid stream work. We were too early, but the designs and workflows were prescient, yet normalizing between all the APIs to provision the orders for execution was difficult. The real value was in the negotiation and packaging of inventory, and once a deal was cut, provisioning the deal for execution into buyer and seller systems. I’m still not sure that prolific inventory like the general web needs this, yet the high value Pubs and STV broadcasters do.
Tony Katsur and the late Josh Wexler were the business leaders on this product. Many lessons learned. Including the drafting of the Programmatic Direct API of the IAB Techlab, and the AdCOM spec to separate the RTB transaction layer from the inventory and campaign objects.
That said, I’m confused as to why AdCP needs to be a branch off an old version of MCP.
Interesting take Brian, thanks for clarifying. Agents negotiating sponsorships and the myriad back and forth with the truly bespoke ad products and solutions out there feels a long way off to me outside the major players in the industry.
AI is incredibly good at adapting to the different needs of publishers and channels. Look at how many MCP wrappers there are out there for the social ad platforms already. This is happening shockingly fast.
I don’t think I question the agents ability; rather the industry’s ability as a whole to know what it actually wants. The number of briefs from advertisers I’ve read with conflicting KPIs and required outcomes over the years is probably where my scepticism comes from. But maybe agents will be able to solve the ambiguity!
I was reading this post and thinking about the sports sponsorship world. There is so much selling infrastructure around sports sponsorships because the deals are large and tend to focus on the main things like jersey/kit/stadium placements etc. But there are tons of other touch points across a sports teams media footprint that if sports teams inside (or even across) leagues all participated in an agentic sponsorship system it would possibly open up a host of new revenue opportunities for them.
Exactly. We've been having some fascinating discussions with creator marketplaces, including some NIL ones, and seems like this is a no brainer. If you know anybody who'd like to explore this, send them my way!
If you're interested in a sports league's perspective, I know some people inside Major League Soccer, I can put out a feeler for you.
Great post!
The comparison to finance is particularly apt, but it highlights a critical structural difference: fungibility. In public markets, returns are homogeneous: two holders of the same asset earn the same return over the same period. Advertising doesn’t share that property. The value of a given impression, platform, or channel can vary dramatically across advertisers.
Because returns are heterogeneous, prices in advertising are a much noisier signal of value than asset prices are in financial markets. As a result, in a lower-friction advertising ecosystem, measurement and attribution increasingly become the binding constraint on efficiency rather than access, scale, or liquidity.
We're moving from a world of buying based on proxies to buying based on proprietary intelligence. The real winners in this low-friction world won't just be the ones with the lowest costs, but the ones who have replaced generic third-party signals with their own high-fidelity measurement loops.
Great point about non-homogeneity! Couldn't agree more on measurement loops.
I’m glad you finally see this distinction between allocation and valuation. It’s why Rubicon Project back in 2014 purchased iSocket and ShinyAds to automate the outside the bid stream work. We were too early, but the designs and workflows were prescient, yet normalizing between all the APIs to provision the orders for execution was difficult. The real value was in the negotiation and packaging of inventory, and once a deal was cut, provisioning the deal for execution into buyer and seller systems. I’m still not sure that prolific inventory like the general web needs this, yet the high value Pubs and STV broadcasters do.
Tony Katsur and the late Josh Wexler were the business leaders on this product. Many lessons learned. Including the drafting of the Programmatic Direct API of the IAB Techlab, and the AdCOM spec to separate the RTB transaction layer from the inventory and campaign objects.
That said, I’m confused as to why AdCP needs to be a branch off an old version of MCP.
Interesting take Brian, thanks for clarifying. Agents negotiating sponsorships and the myriad back and forth with the truly bespoke ad products and solutions out there feels a long way off to me outside the major players in the industry.
AI is incredibly good at adapting to the different needs of publishers and channels. Look at how many MCP wrappers there are out there for the social ad platforms already. This is happening shockingly fast.
I don’t think I question the agents ability; rather the industry’s ability as a whole to know what it actually wants. The number of briefs from advertisers I’ve read with conflicting KPIs and required outcomes over the years is probably where my scepticism comes from. But maybe agents will be able to solve the ambiguity!