At Optable Connect NYC on October 8, we announced the Optable Agentic Marketplace, where buyers and sellers can transact directly via their agents. Then, we revealed that Optable would charge a 0% fee on direct deals between buyers and sellers.
That’s because the current AdTech ecosystem is a complex, confusing, and costly maze. Agentic buying could reduce the stack between buyer and publisher, or it could add even more tolls.
We need to get agentic advertising right. But what does that mean? What does that look like? How about something like this. How about a seller, a buyer, and a direct connection between them? That should be our standard for whatever we build in this new ecosystem. — Andy Sharkey, VP of Product
Agents Shouldn’t Maintain the AdTech Tax
Of every $100 an advertiser spends in open programmatic, just $51 reaches the publisher. The rest is split among intermediaries, and about $15 can’t be traced to anyone.
That’s the nature of the AdTech tax — a stack of technology providers that siphon off the cash flow meant for the people selling their inventory.
Agentic buying could course-correct the pattern. A buyer agent can send a brief straight to a publisher’s seller agent, which proposes matching products at the publisher’s price. Once the publisher approves, the deal gets booked within the publisher’s ad server. An agentic transaction reimagines the buy, with direct deals at programmatic speed and scale.
The risk is that every intermediary bolts on its own agent and keeps its cut, so the same tolls get collected at machine speed. A take rate makes that worse. When a marketplace takes its cut from what the publisher is paid, the deal value shrinks.
We chose not to build that into the Agentic Marketplace, because every dollar a marketplace keeps is money that never reaches the publisher. In short: direct contracts between buyers and sellers incur no additional charge; buyers who want advanced features like clearing pay extra.
No Take Rate for Publishers; No Meter on Briefs or Buys
Agentic connectivity is free for Optable Audience customers. No activation fee, and no charge per task, brief answered, or buy booked. The Agentic Marketplace doesn’t need a toll, because the platform is what publishers pay for.
That leaves buyers and sellers with two ways to transact:
- Directly, between platform customers. Buyers and publishers contract with each other, the deal gets booked in the publisher’s own ad server, and each side invoices the other. Optable never touches the money.
- Through the Marketplace’s advanced features. Buyers who want additional features — such as transaction clearing, consolidated billing (one invoice across every publisher), buyer audience onboarding and targeting, and CAPI integrations — pay an access fee for those services. Optable handles the invoicing, and sellers still pay 0%.
Discovery is free for both sides. Optable’s revenue comes from software worth paying for, not a cut of what publishers earn.
Software should be paid for as software. — Vlad Stesin, CEO, Optable
What Buyers and Sellers Get Today
Onstage in New York, Andy Sharkey, VP of Product, and Chris Couture, Senior Product Manager for Agentic Advertising, walked a sample deal, end to end, through the Agentic Marketplace.
Representing the sell-side, Andy gave a brief tour of the Optable platform where sellers can build ad products (their inventory packaged against a price point). By using Optable as their storefront, sellers can make their inventory discoverable to buyers and their agents. So when a buyer submits a brief through the marketplace, they are presented with matching ad products from each consenting publisher.
Chris showed the Optable platform from the buyer’s perspective. A buyer can connect its buyer agent (including Claude, ChatGPT, or custom-built agents) to submit briefs to the Agentic Marketplace on its behalf. Then, the agent can identify media sellers that have opted in to being discovered by the buyer’s brand.
The buyer agent can then support campaign planning, with reasoning to back up its recommendations, and create a media buy for the planner to approve before sending it to the seller.
From there, the seller can approve the buy, send it to their ad server, and give the final say before it goes live. The Agentic Marketplace stands to shorten the timeline from brief to buy, reduce the number of intermediaries involved, and shrink the AdTech tax while restoring the direct buyer-seller relationships the industry was built on.
For sellers:
- Define products, pricing, and rules once, and buyer agents can discover them.
- Approve every buy and every creative before it runs. Approved buys book straight into a publisher’s ad server.
- Tap into new sources of demand, and see what buyer agents ask for, in their own words.
For buyers:
- Reach every publisher running a Sales Agent through one MCP connection, briefing from Claude, ChatGPT, or your own agent.
- Track every buy with delivery and performance across publishers in one view.
- Use seller audience data and insights or bring your own audiences to premium publisher inventory.
Coming next: A custom ad server connector and proposal management for sellers, plus buyer data rails and more for buyers.
Are You Ready For Agentic Advertising?
Of the attendees we surveyed at Optable Connect, more than half expect to run an agentic deal by the end of 2027, and another 25% have already run one. We built the Agentic Marketplace as a gateway to agentic buying and human-approved selling.
For publishers, the first step is small: pick one high-value package, price it, and put it in front of buyer agents. For agencies and brands, bring a live brief and connect the agent you’re already using.
The Optable Agentic Marketplace is available to pilot today. Talk with the Optable team to get started.
