By Casey Saran, President at Rembrand

AdCP was recently introduced as a standard protocol to help AI agents in the advertising ecosystem communicate, but not everyone agrees on where it will be most useful. It has been described as a protocol for both media buying and creative management. I fall into “team creative.” AdCP comes at a perfect time to help advertisers and their partners with a growing problem – how to make sense of all the creative assets that are now possible to make thanks to new AI creative tools.

While the ad-tech supply chain works out the best way to use AdCP for media buying and audience targeting, brands and agencies can start to think about how they can get some creative benefits out of AdCP. There’s no controversy, less complexity and fewer questions that need to be answered.

The Creative Explosion Is Real

I’ve been in digital advertising for twenty years, and every year, there are more creative assets attached to a single campaign. Most of the growth has come from the emergence of different platforms, especially social media. Ad operations teams spend most of their time manually entering line items and creative details from one tech platform to another – or one spreadsheet to another. All of the different ads are more or less the same, just formatted for a specific ad slot.

When genAI came along a couple of years ago, the number of creative assets exploded. Advertisers can use genAI to make every creative design in every ad size – literally thousands of assets for a single campaign. They can also dynamically generate tons of creatives with different images, messaging, products, whatever they want. Some of this is managed within DCO setups, but a lot is still totally manual.  This is soul-crushing work for junior creatives, ad-ops people, traders and traffickers. 

What Happens When AdOps is Automated

The ultimate dream of having the exact right message for everyone is becoming more feasible with these two AI capabilities – creative development and creative management. As Ari Paparo noted, this manual work is perfectly suited to be replaced by agentic AI. Not only can we use AI to reformat and build new creative, we can use AI agents and agentic AI protocols to upload those creatives across platforms much faster and with fewer errors, optimize more creative, and measure the performance of more creative, too. 

While buyers and sellers will start to get a break from all of the manual work that comes with creative management, there are a few things that could change in the industry once advertisers adopt agentic AI protocols for creative:

• Competition for Standard Inventory – Once every advertiser can easily create and traffic creatives to fit every IAB standard size automatically, there will be a lot more competition for every ad slot. Every advertiser out there, even small brands, will be able to have the right creative to bid on every impression.

• Interest in Unique Creative Opportunities – Automating the basic ad formats frees up brands and publishers to think about more interesting kinds of advertising. Advertisers start to have more room to experiment with more custom formats that still do require some creative development. Publishers start to carve out new opportunities to place ads – in content, using context, across social channels, and more. Mostly because they have the time and resources to dedicate to new creative innovation.

• Creativity Becomes the Performance Lever – Agentic AI basically “democratizes” creative – everyone can make lots of it. So the real value is no longer in having every ad in every size, it’s in developing creative that stands out among the stew of ads that is about to flood the internet.

Consider the Ad Council as an example of how things change. Today, many publishers and tech companies partner with the Ad Council to provide creative opportunities to non-profits with small or no advertising budgets. Ad-tech companies and media companies provide the support to make creative, traffic it, optimize it, and measure it in exchange for a case study to share with prospects.

With agentic AI, those non profits won’t need the same kind support as they have in the past. They’ll be able to develop ads, traffic them, optimize them and measure them cheaply and automatically. When this happens, the Ad Council’s partnership with ad-tech companies and publishers can evolve. Rather than focusing on the manual labor involved in building and trafficking a campaign, partners can actually provide real innovation – like carving out new kinds of inventory, testing unique creative formats for the first time, and leveraging insights to create precise targets or personalized messaging.

This is exactly what could happen with any brand – once the grunt work goes away, the partnership can evolve.

Interoperability Enables New Levels of Creativity

We’ve used IAB standard ad sizes as a way to reduce the complexity of managing and trafficking creative. If media teams only need to build creative in a set number of sizes and formats, it limits the amount of manual work involved. However, with automation and interoperability across the ecosystem, this need could go away. Advertisers and publishers could make unique creative without worrying about increasing the work it takes to manage the new creative.

We are on the cusp of major change in how creative is developed – where standard sizes and cost of ad trafficking no longer limit what we can do. For that opportunity, I’ll happily take the step to align with AdCP.