Meet Anne Coghlan, my co-founder and thought partner. Her ideas and inspiration have been powering this blog for years and it’s time to put her on the masthead. Anne, take it away!
An unmistakable brand gets recognised far beyond the product or service that carries its name. We all have that brand we love, one we’re unreasonably loyal to. My best friends think my new trainers are a crime against fashion, and all it has done is make me love them more (both the trainers and my friends!). Advertising should put a brand in the moments that create that kind of meaning.
Ask a marketer about the best campaign she has ever run and I can guarantee she won’t regale you with a media plan. A campaign starts with an idea, a creative spark, and the hope of reaching a human with a message. Her best campaign was when her brand connected with its consumers in that unmistakable way: what resonated, and how, and what it did for the business. It worked because the creativity met the right people through the best possible medium, at the right moment.
Doing that magic at scale and scope needs the organisations and technologies designed to create it. Most of the advertising technology we have was built for media buying. It carries the transaction, not the brand’s intent. And it’s fundamentally out of touch with our modern world where the line between creatives and creators has blurred, where our medium messages us, where technological magic has become so commonplace as to be the baseline expectation.
This is exactly the kind of systemic problem Brian and I have been obsessed with since we started working together, first at AppNexus, then at Scope3. It’s clear to us, and probably to you, that the solutions we’ve deployed for the last 25 years - the financialisation of advertising, hyper-targeting and micro-measuring - aren’t necessarily making advertising better.
It’s time for a new paradigm that puts creators, marketers, and consumers, and their agents, at the centre. Why do we include agents in this paradigm? Because our future is, as John Vervaeke puts it, to mentor machines. What he means is that our role isn’t simply to give agents instructions; it’s to share our knowledge and experience so they can make wise decisions on our behalf.
Every technology before this one has asked the brand to fit into the system. Agents work the other way round. A brand knows what it wants to achieve. A media owner or creator knows its audience and how to get the best out of its surface. The systems between them have never carried both. Agents can. An advertiser’s agent can hold the ambition, context and guardrails of a brief. A media owner’s or creator’s agent can bring what it knows about its audience and opportunities, and respond with what’s possible. Each side keeps what it knows while making a better decision together.
This is the power and promise of agents. The brands I talk to already have decades of tacit knowledge and historical data about the meaning they create in the world. They have everything they need to be incredible mentors to agents. They are already building agents internally - one brand I just talked to has built 10,000 so far. But not one of them can buy an ad. The agent that wants to buy a bus ad in New York has nowhere to go, and a tavern in Stellenbosch is bought nothing like an ad on Meta.
What’s missing is a safe, effective way to let these agents begin to act in the world, to actually participate in the advertising process. A way to ensure that when the agent executes for a brand like Chanel, Coke, or Mastercard, what comes out is unmistakably that brand.
What’s missing is Apostra.
Apostra: a gateway connecting brands, creators, consumers - and their agents
Today Brian, our co-founder Emma Mulitz, our amazing team and I are proud to announce the launch of Apostra.
Apostra gives brands and their agents a gateway to every kind of advertising. We launch today with forty media partners representing over $600B of media, from in-store audio to local linear TV to influencers to the largest ad platforms in the world. Our ambition is to make every kind of advertising opportunity accessible to brands and their agents, and we’re well on our way.
That access doesn’t require every media owner or creator to work the same way. In fact, that would be the antithesis of Apostra’s goal. An agent doesn’t need every media owner to have an API. It can read a rate card, write to the sales team, fill in the insertion order, in whatever form the medium happens to work. What it needs is one place where every medium can be found and spoken to in a common language. That common language is the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP). Online or offline, broadcast or billboard, Apostra gives agents somewhere to act. The bus in New York and the tavern in Stellenbosch are suddenly reachable.
But access alone isn’t enough. For brands to trust agents to act on their behalf, they need to know that their intent, rules and judgement travel with them. And because Apostra is built on AdCP, every transaction is executed with Embedded Human Judgement, a native governance protocol and philosophy that ensures agents act in the best interests of their humans.
This is what excites me most about what comes next. Not advertising handed over to machines, but brands putting more of their intent, knowledge and judgement to work, across more of the places that matter. I think this video says it all:
Go and make something unmistakable.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post from Brian diving deeper into Apostra…
