In a live poll during Optable’s Beyond the Hype breakout, 51% of attendees described themselves as cautiously optimistic about agentic advertising. Twenty-eight percent identified as sky-high believers, compared to six percent who called themselves outright skeptics.

That mix was the spirit of the Summit. We all felt the urgency, supported by questions about whether the infrastructure, standards, and playbooks will catch up to the ambition.

The day opened with Tim Berners-Lee and closed with WPP Media. In between, more than 20 sessions argued one point from different angles: the agentic web must be built on shared standards, or it will be built badly. The room mostly agreed, but disagreed on where value lands in the agentic stack, what happens to publisher business models in transition, and whether operators can really control systems designed to act on their behalf.

Here are the five threads that ran through the day, what speakers said about each, and where the harder questions still sit unanswered.

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1. Standards as the load-bearing concept

Anthony Katsur framed the day with a single arc: from Turing to the agentic web, the throughline is open infrastructure. Extending programmatic’s philosophy on standards to the agentic layer is the natural move.

The named pieces stacking up:

• AAMP as the agentic protocol layer on top of OpenRTB.
• AdCP as the open standard for agent-to-agent communication, positioned as parallel to OpenRTB rather than a replacement.
• MCP as the standard for agent-to-system context.
• CoMP as the standard for metered, accountable AI content access.
• Cloud deployment patterns for shipping these standards into production environments at scale.

Whether the protocols ship before the platforms route around them is the remaining question.

2. Where in the agentic stack does value land?

This was the most contested thread of the day, and the most useful one for operators trying to plan a roadmap. 

Three positions on the same stack:

• The buy-side orthodoxy. The Trade Desk's Eric Bosco and Stagwell's Dru Sil described agentic AI aligned to outcomes, built on high-quality inputs, always under your control.
• The contrarian view. KERV.ai's Marika Roque pushed back. Bidder optimization, SSP tuning, ad serving, and DCO already run in real time. The opportunity for agentic systems sits in the inputs: planning, audience construction, and the brief itself. Roque argues that 15 years of programmatic optimization have already harvested most of the gains available inside the auction.
• The cross-stack view. The “Agents Across the Ad Stack” panel, moderated by Optable's Bosko Milekic, made the case that the value looks different at every layer. Mike Wolk (Goodway Group), Nishant Khatri (PubMatic), and Scott Menzer (Unity) weighed in. Goodway is rolling out agentic audience workflows to its buyers. PubMatic is shipping agent-to-agent transaction infrastructure. Unity is putting agents on top of runtime behavioral data from mobile gameplay.

None of these are wrong, but they’re not complete on their own, either. Wolk's framing captures the prerequisite the rest of the day mostly assumed: AI on top of fast, wrong data is still wrong. Meanwhile, demand for agentic media is being shaped by buyers, with most of the supply side still watching from the sidelines.

Keep reading: Get Ready for AI Agents Now, Before Buyer Agents Scale

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3. The publisher business model is transitioning in public

Drawing on a network of news organizations, INMA's Gabriel Dorosz painted a picture of traffic disruption from AI-mediated discovery and a business model transition still in progress.

What the transition looks like in practice:

• New monetization primitives. Supertab's CoMP turns AI crawling into a settled commercial transaction, with metering, pricing, and accounting designed for an environment where the page view is no longer the unit of value.
• Premium supply, agentic access. The framing of a publisher operating system that lets buyer agents traverse OpenRTB and AAMP is the most concrete answer in the room to what replaces traffic, clicks, and pages.
• The platform view. Jessica Chan's Perplexity session framed the web as moving from clicks and queries to intelligent discovery.

4. Identity and consent assumptions break when agents act

The identity panel with Will Oatley (Zeroma), Adam Pyett (Ogury), Mathieu Roche (ID5), and Rowena Lam (IAB Tech Lab) took on the question of how identity frameworks need to evolve when an AI agent is the one browsing, searching, and transacting.

Today's identity infrastructure was built to connect a human across devices and channels. The agentic era introduces a new layer on top of that: an agent acting on a user's behalf, with its own session, context, and path to purchase.

The two surfaces under pressure:

• Identity. When an agent acts on behalf of a user, whose identity attaches to the resulting impression? Which framework reconciles AI, online, and offline signals into a coherent path to purchase?
• Consent. The legal architecture of digital privacy assumes a human reads a banner and chooses, but agents do not read banners. The consent surface the industry spent a decade building risks losing its addressee.

LiveRamp's Christian Carlsson framed agentic audiences under AAMP as the reconciliation layer, with transparency and control as the design principles. Whether transparency to a human and transparency to an agent require the same thing is an open question.

5. The control paradox

Operators want control, but the emerging technologies stand to remove it.

Two positions in tension:

• Control as a feature. The Trade Desk and Stagwell sold their session on agents being “always under your control.” Snowflake's activation framing centered the same value. Meta's Artur Souza described the move from scripted responses to context-aware, action-oriented agents, which is, read plainly, a description of moving the human further out of the loop.
• Control as illusion. Mobian's Jonah Goodhart pushed back. In an AI-first world, brands can’t fully control how they appear. Context determines meaning, and the brand is not the author of its own context.

What happens when agents transact with other agents and the human is one step removed from each decision?

The honest answer is that operators can retain control over inputs, objectives, and guardrails, but they may eventually surrender the supervision of moment-to-moment decisions agents make. That trade is the deal of the agentic era.

What didn't get said

There were a few absences worth flagging, because they are the topics the industry will have to address.

• Measurement. How do agent-mediated impressions get measured against agent-mediated outcomes?
• Buy-side economics. When an agency runs an agent on behalf of a brand, who pays for the compute, on what model, and how does that cost compare to the human equivalent it displaces?
• The non-US view. INMA brought a global lens, but the European regulatory reality remained relatively unaddressed.
• Where the hype has outpaced reality. The honest answers about which agent deployments stalled or never delivered against the pitch weren’t discussed, leaving little room for collaborative problem solving to overcome the challenges.

What we took away

Agreeing on standards is an essential step. The harder work, which will decide whether the agentic web pays operators back, lies in audience construction, identity reconciliation across human and agent signals, and commercial primitives like CoMP and AAMP that turn agent activity into accountable transactions.

For the industry, the urgency centers on AdCP, AAMP, MCP, and CoMP shipping in time to matter. For organizations ready to move forward, the work lies in auditing their agent readiness, identifying where agents create real lift today, and building the infrastructure that makes agent-to-agent collaboration possible when it arrives.

Where Optable sat in the conversation

Bosko Milekic moderated “Agents Across the Ad Stack” with Mike Wolk (Goodway Group), Scott Menzer (Unity), and Nishant Khatri (PubMatic). This session discussed where agentic AI is currently creating real value for the buy side, sell side, and platforms. 

John Rosendahl and Andy Sharkey led the “Beyond the Hype” breakout on what agents actually do for media buying and selling workflows today. The session was built around the Optable & Digiday State of Agentic Advertising survey, live audience polls on agentic AI, and a demo of Optable's Audience Agent. The structural argument: the hype curve looks different once the technology is sitting in front of you. Audience Agent sessions grew 89% from Q1 to Q2 with the customer count doubling, and Q2 is still in progress.

Both sessions returned to the same question: what actually changes on Monday morning? Audience Agents in the RFP workflow and Sales Agents representing publishers in the ecosystem are how Optable is answering it, creating the foundation for the Agentic Collaboration Marketplace.

If you were at the Summit, we'd love to compare notes. If you missed it, we’re continuing the conversation at Cannes Lion in June.

AI agents are already reshaping how advertising is bought. Advertisers are deploying them to plan campaigns, evaluate publisher inventory, and negotiate deals—at machine speed and at a scale no human team can match.

This shift is happening inside today’s RFP and direct-sales process, not in some future marketplace. Buyer agents are increasingly determining which publishers are considered, how their audiences are valued, and how quickly deals move. For publishers, the implication is immediate: if your inventory cannot be understood and evaluated by these systems, it risks being overlooked entirely.

Agent readiness is the work of ensuring that doesn’t happen. It is the process of preparing publisher data, audiences, and inventory to be discoverable, interpretable, and competitive in an environment where machines are the first point of evaluation.

There are two reasons to prioritize this work now rather than waiting for the agentic marketplace to mature:

1. The return on agent-ready infrastructure shows up in the current RFP cycle, not just in some future quarter when buyer agents become the standard.
2. The standards governing agentic advertising are being written right now, and publishers who wait will inherit rules that others have already defined.

See a shift by the next RFP cycle

The work that makes a publisher’s inventory available to a buyer agent has immediate value inside the current direct-sales motion. Agent readiness depends on a handful of foundational assets:

• A unified identity graph
• Audience segments enriched with verified third-party attributes & your own structured first party data
• Inventory packaging that answers what’s available, who you reach, and at what price

Each asset strengthens your next RFP response while preparing your inventory for agentic evaluation. Buyer agents are already querying publisher inventory at machine speed, and sales agents that can directly respond to them are emerging. When that agent-to-agent communication matures, deal cycles condense from weeks of human back-and-forth into minutes of structured exchange between systems.

Signal and audience agents are already running on the publisher side, synthesizing and packaging audience data into outputs that sales and buyer agents can act on.

The payoff will show up within the quarter, long before the agentic marketplace fully develops.

Shape the standards being written today

Agentic advertising only works at scale if buyers and sellers share a common language for agents to discover audiences, negotiate deals, exchange brand safety signals, and enforce publisher-defined rules. Built on MCP, the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) is defining how agents transact across the advertising ecosystem, and the IAB Tech Lab is running a similar agentic track with their AAMP framework.

What matters to publishers is that open, interoperable standards prevail, and that publisher interests shape the outcome. An interoperable standard gives your premium audiences a path to buyers beyond walled gardens. It lets a buyer agent discover, evaluate, and transact on the value of your inventory directly, at prices that reflect the value of your audience, without routing that value through a closed ecosystem or requiring manual negotiation at every step.

The working groups developing these protocols are open, and they need publisher voices to weigh in. A few ways to engage:

• Join the groups shaping the standards. Organizations like the AgenticAdvertising.org and  IAB Tech Lab run open agentic tracks. Membership gets you a seat in the conversations where standards are being defined.
• Assign a data or revenue strategy operator to attend. You don’t need a senior engineer, just someone who understands your inventory well enough to read proposals and respond.
• Submit comments on the decisions that affect your business. Share your opinions on inventory representation, audience description, pricing, brand safety, and consent.

How to become agent-ready

Buyer agents are moving faster than publisher workflows can keep up with. Three operational priorities close that gap:

• Assess honestly. Run a cross-functional audit across data engineering, ad operations, revenue, and legal to map where you stand across the pillars of agent readiness: data, inventory signals, content and context signals, technical infrastructure, and organizational awareness.
• Pilot on a real workflow. Pick one property, audience, or deal type. Configure an agent against that scope, establish a control group, and run it against live direct-sales RFPs over a defined window. Document performance and evaluate how you can move forward.
• Continue shaping the standards. Keep participating in these governance efforts as you run your pilot. The decisions being made in parallel to your work will define the marketplace that emerges.

Agent readiness is the prerequisite for the future of AI-powered media selling and agentic collaboration, and investing in it now benefits your manual and programmatic workflows today.

Start the Audit, Run the Pilot, and Claim Your Sea

Agent readiness is operational work that pays off inside your current workflow and positions your organization for the emerging agentic marketplace. The publishers who start the work now will enter that marketplace with a foundation their competitors are still scrambling to build.

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This article is originally published on Digital Content Next on May 4, 2026.

CTV ad spend is growing, but most publishers aren't capturing their share. Without a robust identity infrastructure, publishers can’t monetize their rich audience data at a premium price, connect their audiences to valuable signals or transaction data, or transact at the speed the market now demands.

Two Distinct Identity Challenges

CTV poses two unique challenges: siloed data and unauthenticated data. Without a clear idea of who their users are, CTV platforms can’t accurately resolve identity, create addressable audiences, or implement agentic workflows.

For premium streaming publishers, broadcaster apps, and subscription video services, rich data is available. Viewers have logged in with their own accounts, but this login data sits in separate systems that don't talk to each other. A major media company might have authenticated viewer data in a news app, TV streaming app, and magazine subscriptions with no connection between them. Advertisers can't reach the same person across properties because the publisher's systems don't recognize it's the same person.

For free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) publishers, the situation is different. No login is required means no email address and no account data. With device ID or household IP, identity resolution becomes more difficult. A viewer watching a free channel on Roku or a Samsung TV is effectively anonymous to the ad system, even if they sit in a household with a known address, purchasing history, and browsing behavior on other devices.

Both problems cost publishers money. The solutions are related but distinct, and an identity infrastructure worth building needs to handle both.

Why the Web Playbook Doesn't Translate to CTV

Publishers who approach CTV with web-based tooling quickly realize that the methods that work in a browser don't function in a streaming environment.

The tag-based approaches that most web identity infrastructure uses don't apply. Identity resolution on CTV has to happen server-side, which is a meaningfully higher technical lift than adding a script to a web page.

The identifier landscape compounds this. The signals that exist across streaming platforms come in different forms and don't naturally connect: Roku IDs, Samsung TV device identifiers, Fire TV device IDs, household IP addresses, and hashed email addresses all live in separate environments.

The household IP is the most useful signal available for FAST audiences. A household that watches free content and visits the publisher's web properties can be linked via residential IP. Adding web behavioral data makes the inferred CTV profile much stronger.

Solving CTV identity in isolation tends to undervalue what publishers already have access to. A publisher whose CTV data lives separately from their web and mobile data surrenders targeting precision and remains invisible to the automated systems buyers are already using to discover and activate against publisher inventory.

What CTV Identity Infrastructure Needs

The underlying infrastructure needed is the same regardless of which problem a publisher is trying to address.

Both require a server-side resolution layer that evaluates available identifiers for a given impression and selects the strongest one in real time. That selection happens automatically, with consent and privacy enforcement built into the workflow. Publishers can then directly connect to CTV-specific ad servers and SSPs including Publica, Freewheel, and Magnite.

Publishers with siloed authenticated data need to resolve the same viewer's identity across sources, including:

• TV streaming and VOD apps
• News apps
• Magazine  subscriptions
• Web properties

Publishers with unauthenticated inventory need to make inferences about their users to get a clearer idea of who they are. The path is straightforward:

1. Collect Household IP addresses and device identifiers from the streaming environment
2. Map these identifies to email addresses through data partnerships
3. Translate them into alternative IDs the programmatic ecosystem recognizes
4. Share the resolved identifiers to the ad server without ever needing an email

The same identity foundation should handle both resolution paths. Agentic audience workflows require a single, queryable graph to function. A fragmented infrastructure can only ever propose partial audiences, and partial audiences don't win briefs.

The Agentic Payoff

Identity resolution is the prerequisite for unlocking agentic revenue opportunities. The payoff becomes possible when publishers don’t have to rely on manual audience packaging and activation. Agentic workflows enable efficiencies and opportunities, including:

Local Household Targeting

Connecting household-level identity to geographic and behavioral signals creates high-value inventory packages for local and regional advertisers. But the audiences need to be continuously refreshed as new viewing data comes in, and manually matching them to incoming briefs at scale isn't viable.

Optable’s Audience Agent reads an incoming brief, queries the identity graph for matching households, builds the audience, and routes activation through integrated SSPs. A workflow that previously required a data analyst and a campaign manager now completes in minutes.

Content Alignment

Publishers with strong editorial signals can command a premium by matching advertiser brand requirements to specific content environments. Performing that analysis across a large CTV catalog and keeping it current requires automation.

Optable’s lightweight SDK continuously collects and organizes your 1P data, giving the Audience Agent up-to-date information for audience discovery, packaging, and activation.

Addressable FAST Inventory

FAST publishers have large impression volumes and low baseline addressability, meaning even modest resolution rates produce meaningful revenue. Because those audiences are built from inferred signals rather than deterministic data, they need to be rebuilt continuously as viewing behavior changes.

Optable's Audience Agent uses content context and behavioral signals to construct audience packages that give buyers a credible reason to pay a premium on inventory they might otherwise overlook.

Across all three applications, the practical effect is the same: publishers with lean teams can handle more volume, respond to briefs more quickly, and offer more customized proposals without adding headcount.

CTV Revenue Begins With Identity

Publishers with siloed authenticated data need to connect what they already have. FAST publishers need to build from the signals they have available. These starting points converge on the same outcome: a unified identity and audience infrastructure that spans every environment where viewers show up, in a format that buyers and buyer agents can act on.

Publishers need a robust identity infrastructure to build addressable audiences, manage ad frequency across devices, close the measurement loop, and participate meaningfully in the emerging agentic ecosystem. The identity work done today determines which publisher inventory is visible to buyer systems tomorrow. 

Ready to build an identity foundation for the agentic era? Schedule a demo today.

More RFPs mean more deal opportunities, but for leaner Ad Ops teams, meeting advertisers’ rising expectations can be increasingly difficult. Advertisers are increasingly looking for personalized, unique approaches to their RFPs.

Manually responding to an RFP takes too long to keep up with those time-sensitive demands, especially when advertisers are using buyer agents to query your inventory.

The Cost of a Slow RFP Response

Unanswered RFPs leave money on the table. The manual response process doesn’t meet the market’s demands for volume, speed, and specificity.

The impact of slow responses extends beyond fumbling isolated deals:

• Lean Ad Ops teams are faced with higher volumes of incoming RFPs, increasing the gap between demand and bandwidth.
• Publishers responding under pressure tend to default to familiar, broad segments, resulting in undifferentiated proposals to buyers who expect precision.
• Teams that are at capacity may sideline incoming RFPs, which registers only as unanswered briefs instead of lost revenue.
• Advertisers may deprioritize publishers who don’t respond with audience recommendations at the pace and depth they’ve come to expect from walled gardens.
• As more advertisers deploy buyer agents to search for inventory, a manual workflow has no answer for a buyer agent querying your inventory outside business hours.

The solution isn’t just to speed up the process but to improve the specificity of audience proposals. Agentic workflows supported by platforms like Optable make it possible to surface audiences that manual processes routinely miss and close the loop from RFP to activation without the bottlenecks.

How Agentic Workflows Are Changing the Sales Process

No matter how good the team is, a manual RFP workflow limits how many briefs they can strategically answer in a day. Agentic workflows remove that cap by changing what happens at each stage of the sales process.

When a brief arrives, instead of routing it to a queue and waiting for a data analyst to pull segments, the agentic workflow begins immediately. An agent can read the brief, extract campaign goals, and generate audience recommendations using the publisher’s enriched first-party data. Publishers with low or declining traffic can more effectively monetize their audiences when an agent surfaces precise, differentiated segments to target.

This process surfaces segments that a manual query would overlook: niche behavioral combinations, trait correlations, and audience overlaps that only become visible when systematically searching the full depth of the data. Optable's Audience Agent handles this step, proposing ranked segments with confidence scores and reach estimates that give the sales team something to review rather than build from scratch.

The team can adjust in natural language to instantly update the recommendations. A human reviews before anything activates, keeping the publisher in control of what goes out and to whom. Then, the agent can generate a response draft and activate audiences directly across ad servers and SSPs. The proposal, complete with audience definitions, reach estimates, and pricing, is ready to send in a fraction of the time.

Agentic workflows also change how buyers and sellers interact. As agencies and brands increasingly deploy buyer agents to search for inventory, publishers who aren't visible to those systems are out of consideration. A Sales Agent like Optable’s allows publishers to define their audience products, configure pricing and access rules, and make that inventory automatically discoverable and transactable to buyer agents querying for relevant audiences.

Publishers with premium audiences get access to more deals, and buyers receive a structured proposal mapped to their brief.

What Your Team Can Do With the Time Back

When proposal building stops eating up your team’s bandwidth, the work that requires human judgment gets the attention it deserves. For Ad Ops teams, that looks like:

• More thorough campaign analysis: With a tool like Optable’s Audience Agent handling brief intake and segment recommendations, teams can focus on surfacing compelling insights around their advertiser’ audience to build smarter packages around performance instead of availability.
• More niche, addressable audience products: With agentic support, teams can develop more compelling audience products that go beyond standard segments without allocating more resources to surface them.
• Unique, custom creative approaches: Brands aren’t looking for cookie cutter proposals. They want to see platforms with custom audiences built from unique first-party data that aligns with their vision, and agentic solutions give Ad Ops teams the time and ability to deliver.
• The ability to answer more briefs: Lean teams can address briefs that they previously would have deprioritized or overlooked due to bandwidth constraints, increasing revenue potential without expanding headcount.
• Stronger advertiser relationships: Teams that aren’t weighed down with manual processes have more time for data collaboration with buyers. Sharing audience insights, validating campaign fit, and collaborating on strategy builds transparency that fosters a long-term partnership.

Agents help relieve the mechanical burden of processing and responding to RFPs so your team can focus on more meaningful tasks that require creativity, strategy, and human judgment.

Win More Deals With Smarter Workflows

Ad Ops teams with the right infrastructure to support them can respond faster, propose better audiences, and build stronger advertiser relationships without working harder.

Agentic workflows change what a lean Ad Ops team can accomplish in a day: more brief responses, more precise audiences, and more time for the strategic work that turns one campaign into a long-term relationship.

Every brief the agent handles well is data that informs the next one. Every niche audience that wins a deal becomes part of a stronger audience product portfolio. 

The buying landscape is moving toward greater automation on all sides. Publishers building agentic infrastructure are positioned to compete in that environment and won’t have to scramble to catch up.

Optable gives publisher teams the agentic infrastructure to do exactly that, from RFP intake and audience activation to outbound discoverability. Ready to see it in action? Schedule a demo.

We returned to the Beeler.Tech Navigator event this year to join fellow industry leaders in conversations about latent data, signal quality, practical AI applications, and more. Optable’s Director of Sales, Kristy Schafer, led a session with Tim Hurd, VP of Media at Goodway Group, to share how the agency rebuilt their audience stack.

That initiative produced Passport One, Goodway’s proprietary data and intelligence layer that centralizes audience creation and decisioning with the ability to activate across the ecosystem. Optable provides the identity, audience, and collaboration layer where clients onboard first-party data and Goodway centralizes its enterprise data partnerships.

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What Goodway Built

The motivation was straightforward. Goodway wanted a system that allowed them to centralize audience creation and decisioning with the ability to activate across the ecosystem.

In practice, that resulted in:

• Client data onboarding dropped from four weeks to roughly five minutes.
• The data fees stacked into every activation came down.
• More spend now routes directly to the source: the publishers themselves.
• Planners can index and overlap consumer segments to hit multiple consumer profiles with more strategic impression targeting.

The goal throughout: more value out of every working dollar, with more of that revenue passing through to the content owner.

Why They Built It

Tim spent meaningful time on the why behind the work. Goodway's clients aren't simple. A single brand often needs to reach multiple consumer personas at once, against very different media outcomes across awareness, in-store visits, and new account creation.

That kind of complexity demands a centralized audience layer, where the same audience can be pushed out to a multitude of destinations rather than rebuilt for each one. His point landed cleanly: the more easily publishers can plug into that workflow, the easier it becomes to spend with them.

What This Means for Publishers

Asked what he most wants from publishers going forward, Tim was direct. He hopes publishers will build similar infrastructure on their side in the form of interoperable audience platforms.

The next phase on this journey is agent readiness. As both buyer- and seller-side agents evolve, publishers with a strong identity and audience layer will be the ones surfacing inside the agency's buying strategy.

Agencies will gain the ability to build audience strategies across publishers using the underlying metadata of each one's identity and audience infrastructure. In turn publishers can better monetize their first-party data while still allowing the agency to buy at scale from one centralized location.

What Happened to CPMs?

The question that probably mattered most to the audience came from a publisher in the room: what's happened to CPMs through all of this?

Tim's answer: CPMs have come down. The agency gets the efficiency it set out to capture, and more of that working media is now flowing straight to the publisher instead of being absorbed by the middle.

The broader upside for publishers willing to evolve in this direction:

• Less ad-tech in the way
• More paths to buying
• Broader inclusion in plans

That dynamic is exactly the upside Tim's pitch holds out for publishers willing to evolve in the direction he's describing.

He closed with a line that captured the whole posture:

‍"Democratize data access, and look at each other less as competitors and more as a cohort."

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Why Identity Is Key to the Agentic Revenue Engine

As the agentic era takes off, publishers and advertisers are looking to enable and implement intelligent workflows for adtech use cases. At the same time, third-party identifiers continue to decline, so publishers are motivated to stop relying on external signals and start building and activating their own direct audience data. The solution positioned to allow publishers to leverage new AI-powered agents and turn first-party data into their most durable asset is the identity graph.

Agentic solutions generally connect to data from a variety of sources, including first-party, partner integrations, and contextual or 3rd party signals. While the latter two sources have some influence on AI-powered results, the richer, more accurate, and more detailed your first-party data is, the more you can control and improve the outcomes from your AI agents. 

Additionally, as signals such as third-party identifiers (including device identifiers and IP addresses) decline or become inconsistently available, audience addressability is undergoing a fundamental shift. You can no longer rely on free, third-party signals. Instead, high-quality audience data and addressability now depend on direct, privacy-first audience relationships that build trust and prioritize data security and consent.

The identity graph sits at the center of this double transformation, feeding high-quality data to agentic tools while also enabling publishers to recognize audiences across channels and activate them in privacy-safe ways. Strategically activating your ID graph unlocks revenue opportunities that enhance and extend beyond programmatic advertising.

What an ID Graph Really Unlocks

Your ID graph becomes the connective tissue between your data, your partners, and your revenue strategies, as well as the core intelligence that powers your agentic solutions. By linking identifiers such as hashed emails, device IDs, login IDs, contextual signals, and more, publishers can use identity graphs to build up a unified view of their audiences across web, mobile, CTV, and in-app environments.

This unified view allows you to:

• Empower AI-powered audience planning and activation
• Increase addressability without having to rely on third-party cookies
• Improve match rates with key partners (SSPs, DMPs, CDPs)
• Enrich inventory with high-value audience signals
• Maintain transparency, consent, and privacy controls

A robust ID graph transforms fragmented data into a powerful tool for monetization, measurement, collaboration, and operational efficiency. Here’s how to ensure your identity strategy is scalable and aligned with business objectives for long-term success.

Step 1: Align Your Teams around a Strong Identity Strategy

Before they can achieve any kind of successful activation, publisher organizations need to set clear goals and coordinate across teams and functions.

Assemble a Cross-Functional Workgroup

Identity-related projects require coordination with multiple teams across a publisher’s business, including  ad operations, data analysts, developers, and legal teams. A cross-functional workgroup ensures alignment on compliance requirements, use case prioritization, and execution.

Define Success for Your Organization

Whether it’s increasing bid CPMs through enrichment or launching new authentication strategies, every initiative must have well-defined, measurable success markers. Correlate these goals with clear tracking methodologies to ensure progress and accountability. Depending on where you intend to move the needle, you may need to consider custom tooling for effective tracking and attribution.

Connect Goals to Measurable KPIs

Tie your goals to measurable KPIs such as match rate improvement, authentication growth, and time-to-integration for new partners. KPIs will largely fall into four primary categories: monetization and revenue; data and identity strategy; campaign performance and measurement; and operational efficiency. 

Respect Regulations and Requirements

Privacy regulations vary by location (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), so your identity solution must account for consent preferences and legal restrictions no matter where your audience is located. Implement transparent data collection practices, and use consent management platforms (CMPs) where necessary to increase trust with advertisers and audiences.

Step 2: Audit Your Data and Identify Gaps

Our report with Digiday on the state of audience data monetization found that 50% of publishers are limited by decentralized data. So once you set your goals, your next step is to understand and manage your current data landscape. Identify gaps that limit addressability by auditing where data lives and how it’s collected, stored, and activated.

• Map your entire data ecosystem so you can see where your data is stored and what tools manage it. Critically, the mapping process will also help you identify data silos and create a strategy for integrating that data into a unified, central repository.
• Include both first-party and third-party identifiers in your data audit, with a focus on deterministic, high-quality signals like authenticated user IDs and hashed emails.
• Determine how much of your audience is covered by first-party identifiers. Uncovering how much is invisible in identity gaps will guide key decisions around authentication strategies and enrichment partners.

Step 3: Expand and Strengthen Authentication

As shared third-party IDs become less reliable and readily available, authentication becomes the backbone of a durable identity graph. Unfortunately, most publishers have a comparatively low percentage of authenticated users, which decreases the value of their inventory. Capturing reliable, authenticated identifiers results in better targeting, stronger audience insights, improved measurement, and higher confidence for advertisers.

Publishers need to focus on expanding authentication to unlock more reliable identifiers and increase the value of their identity graphs. Effective strategies for authenticating users include offering email subscriptions, premium content or membership models, platform-based logins, and engagement-driven experiences such as newsletters, contests, or gated content. Each interaction across these authentication channels strengthens first-party data and improves the ability to recognize users in decreasing cookie environments, creating more opportunities for effective advertising.

Step 4: Maximize ROI through Well-Defined Use Cases

While an identity graph is an important tool, what matters most for driving revenue is how effectively you leverage it. By defining the key use cases that will allow you to maximize return on investment, you can transform your ID graph into a competitive advantage, increasing competition for inventory, improving match rates with identity frameworks, and driving higher CPMs. 

Programmatic monetization or direct ad sales are often the first places publishers see returns from identity activation. By adding valuable data signals such as user intent or first-party insights, you can offer advertisers opportunities for more precise targeting and maximized reach, which improves bid value for your inventory.

Additionally, a robust ID graph allows you to create high-quality, anonymized audiences or segments to either offer to advertisers at premium pricing or to sell on data marketplaces. You can also collaborate with advertisers to align inventory and data with their goals, so you can offer differentiated, enriched segments and high impact, custom ad opportunities that drive better results.

In short, the work of developing audiences with your first-party data and a strong identity foundation pays off in increased bid values, improved addressability, and new revenue streams.

Building on Programmatic: Where Real Growth Happens

Programmatic advertising remains the foundation of revenue for publishers, but it can be leveraged for even greater returns through agentic advertising tools in the age of AI. A well-composed ID graph is positioned to be the key foundation for agentic success, evolving programmatic into a more data-driven, less manual process that yields better results for publishers and advertisers alike.

Agentic solutions can act as AI-powered co-pilots for your sales teams, automating workflows and audience segmentation. But an AI agent is only as good as the data it uses. That’s why an identity graph built on curated first-party data remains the key for futureproofing your advertising strategy and achieving sustainable growth now and in the agentic era.

Audience-Based Direct Deals and AI-Ready Workflows

With a robust ID graph, publishers can connect  a tool like Optable’s Audience Agent and use AI to package first-party audiences into premium, audience-based deals. ID graphs provide the governed data foundation that autonomous systems need to shorten time from planning to activation, accelerating RFP response times, scaling operations, and growing revenue in the agentic era.

Centralized identity data streamlines manual processes. It helps you leverage agentic solutions to reveal hidden audiences, analyzing every signal across all your data sources. It also uncovers previously unseen audiences within your identity graph, turning overlooked segments into valuable revenue opportunities. You can then market these segments to advertisers as a new, powerful way to reach qualified audiences at scale, commanding higher demand, fill rates, and revenue.

Audience Enrichment and Premium Pricing

Identity graphs are  a foundation for enrichment opportunities with trusted data partners. Publishers can enable more precise targeting for advertisers by working with a data partner to bridge identity gaps across devices and platforms. This increases addressability and activates more precise targeting, ensuring seamless audience recognition in both authenticated and anonymous environments for improved campaign performance. More precise targeting equals improved campaign performance, which results in strong, long-term advertiser relationships and revenue growth for publishers.

You can also enrich your first-party audiences with third-party demographic, behavioral, or intent-based attributes. Optable Attributes allows you to enrich your audience footprint with additional audience data. The increased granularity of audience segments lets you create new and compelling ad packages for advertisers. An enriched audience built on a well-composed ID graph enhances ad relevance, driving higher engagement and performance. The ability to produce these kinds of measurable results for advertisers then leads to opportunities to sell your inventory at premium pricing. 

Data Clean Room Collaboration

Today, three out of four publishers and advertisers view clean rooms for collaboration as important to their monetization strategy (source: Digiday Report). Clean rooms work hand-in-hand with identity graphs by enabling anonymized data matching across publisher identity graphs and advertiser datasets, providing a privacy-safe way for advertisers, agencies, and partners to match and analyze audiences for planning, activation, and measurement. This allows for custom audience planning, more accurate attribution, and transparent measurement, all resulting in high-value campaigns that can drive premium deals with advertising and publishing partners.

The Globe and Mail partnered with Optable to run direct campaigns via clean rooms and achieved 3.4x greater reach, 2.5x lower cost per reach, and 1.5x higher viewable impression efficiency. Read the case study here.

New Monetization Opportunities

Identity graphs can open doors to non-traditional revenue streams. As a publisher, you have unique insights into your audience that can provide incredible value to other publishers and advertisers. For example, your robust ID graph can be licensed to other organizations so they can leverage it in tandem with their first-party data for expanded reach and improved targeting. You can also build cooperative partnerships with fellow publishers by combining your respective ID graphs in a privacy-safe manner so as to improve reach and revenue opportunities for you both. 

Turn Identity into a Competitive Advantage with Optable

The simultaneous shift away from third-party identifiers and towards agentic solutions offers publishers a unique opportunity. Investing in, building up, and activating your own ID graph means you can feed the highest quality data into emerging AI tools. You can then leverage AI to expand addressability, deepen advertiser relationships, and unlock new revenue streams by expanding the accuracy and reach of traditional programmatic advertising. The ability to securely connect, activate, and collaborate around audience data is what will drive long-term growth in the agentic era.

Activating your ID graph should be an ongoing strategy that evolves with regulations, technology shifts, and advertiser expectations. You need an intelligent platform that helps you assemble an identity graph across all your sources, enrich it with partner data sets, and activate it in all the channels that matter most for your business.

Optable is purpose-built to help publishers and their partners activate their identity data and drive smarter, more relevant, and more profitable advertising. Optable Audience Agent  frees you from manual, human-mediated workflows and facilitates intelligent agent-to-agent collaboration that accelerates execution, reduces complexity, and drives better outcomes. We provide the open and interoperable infrastructure you need for secure, policy-governed data activation in the age of AI.

Ready to activate your ID graph for the agentic era? Contact our team to learn more.

Google algorithm updates have contributed to traffic fluctuations for years. Now, declines are even more rampant as AI-generated answers absorb search intent and social platforms deprioritize publisher content.

There’s the instinct to chase traffic volume with more content, increased optimization efforts, and broader distribution plans. In the past, this approach may have been enough to regain lost traffic, but volume alone isn’t going to solve your audience monetization problem.

The more urgent question to address is what you’re doing with the audience you already have. The publishers who can recognize, enrich, and monetize their unique visitors are better off than those who prioritize traffic volume alone.

This is the first of several posts inspired by the challenges highlighted during the 2026 Digiday Publishing Summit. Revisit the blog soon for more insights.

Traffic Volume Isn’t Your Best Asset; Your Audience Is

The simple truth is that audience addressability matters more than traffic volume. Quality over quantity, as the saying goes. Your best asset isn’t the size of your audience but your known users: resolved IDs and audience segments you can clearly identify, package, and sell to advertisers.

The majority of traffic is anonymous and unauthenticated, as we found in our State of Audience Data Monetization report with Digiday, making it nearly impossible to monetize at the rates your audiences should warrant. So when traffic declines and doesn’t recover, publishers who rely on volume for their programmatic revenue feel the impact right away. But those with known, addressable audiences can persevere and monetize their inventory more precisely and efficiently.

With this reality in mind, publishers can shift their goals away from increasing site sessions and instead focus on maximizing the revenue potential of the sessions they receive.

You Can’t Sell What You Can’t See

Before any AI or agentic solution can work, you need a unified view of who actually makes up your audience. Publishers have a wealth of rich first-party data available, but even if your platform gets thousands of daily visitors, fragmented identifiers alone do not form coherent, actionable profiles. Identity resolution using 1P attributes, 3P enrichment, authenticated identifiers, and inferred identifiers creates golden records: privacy-preserving, persistent, and unified accounts for every visitor.

Building a golden record is an essential part of an effective audience and monetization strategy centered around 1P data. Across programmatic, direct, curated, and agentic workflows, resolved IDs make it possible to build meaningful segments that clearly demonstrate audience quality to advertisers. Without this foundation, publishers are limited by what they don’t know and can’t accurately convey or monetize their premium audiences.

The More You Can Tell Your Advertising Partners About Your Audience, The More Valuable They AreTaking your known users to addressable audiences you can activate across platforms requires depth beyond your unified identity foundation. Layering in 3P enrichment transforms traffic into premium inventory; it’s the difference between someone who visits your site once and a homeowner between 35 and 44 years old in the market for a new car.

Publishers with an enriched identity graph have the option to create more specific, addressable audience segments, which in turn command higher CPMs. We’ve seen how appending resolved identifiers like UID2 to outgoing bids directly lifts programmatic revenue, with increases in CPM and addressability.

Manually building discoverable audiences from an enriched ID graph is possible but takes time, as Ad Ops teams can attest. But the industry is moving rapidly towards agentic workflows that are changing the game.

Instead of tediously combing through data after receiving an RFP, publishers can use tools like Optable’s Audience Agent to review the contents, search inventory, and compile new audience segments within parameters that prevent hallucinations. Those audiences can be packaged and activated across SSPs and ad servers from the platform, and the agent can even draft a response, saving teams the time and brain power they can better use for strategic initiatives.

The result is a monetization engine that runs on the audience you already have. With enriched, packaged audiences ready to go, AI can take it the rest of the way.

Stop Chasing Traffic and Start Selling Audiences

Traffic will always matter for audience monetization, but a strategy that depends only on volume is not viable in the age of AI. Thriving in this environment hinges on a concrete identity foundation and agentic layers that can assemble, activate, and sell audiences quickly and accurately.

The emerging agentic ecosystem will reward publishers who know their audiences, can package them precisely, and can sell them at machine speed. The tools to build that infrastructure and connect to the agentic ecosystem are available now.

Ready to get started? Schedule a demo.

Publishers are navigating a complex programmatic landscape across fragmented deal-making, AI disruption, and the continued pressure of walled gardens. Last month, Optable's VP of Product, Andy Sharkey, joined a lineup of industry leaders on The Pub Report’s latest webinar to dig into these challenges and what's actually being done about them.

Here's what stood out.

The Big Picture: No One Wins Alone

The through-line across every session was the importance of collaboration.

That spirit set the tone for a conversation that was less about abstract AI hype and more about practical applications that fit into the workflows publishers and buyers already rely on today.

"There's no better time than right now to be collaborating and coming together and talking about these key topics. No one is going to succeed on their own." — Rob Beeler, Beeler.Tech

Practical Applications of Agentic Advertising With Optable’s Andy Sharkey

Kicking things off, Andy made a compelling case for how agentic AI can ease one of programmatic's most persistent pain points: the operational burden of managing PMP and curated deals at scale.

As PMP and curated deals have become increasingly central to publisher revenue strategies, Ad Ops teams are feeling the pressure. Campaign planning is traditionally manual, slow, and fragmented. The process can't sustainably keep pace with demand.

One solution? A Sales Agent built to slot into the existing programmatic ecosystem without replacing the core workflows.

Andy demoed an example of this in practice using Claude, connected to Optable. Here’s how it can work:

1. A buyer drops a campaign brief directly into the agent.
2. The agent reads the brief, identifies relevant deal packages (for example: CTV and video inventory targeting specific demographics across web and mobile) and surfaces available options automatically.
3. Once the buyer activates a deal, the agent finds the preferred SSP, generates a new deal ID, injects it into the SSP, and shares it with the buyer to load into their DSP.

The best part? It’s not science fiction. As Andy put it: "We're not talking about a complete revolution with AI. Publishers are going to continue with their SSPs and DSPs and partners for the foreseeable future. This is a technology layer we can introduce to help automate the creation of PMPs and curated deals."

On the publisher side, the agent gives teams control over how their inventory is represented, allowing them to define audience packages, set pricing, toggle on discovery for specific demographics, and manage authorized buyers. It's designed to be SSP-agnostic with potential for connectivity across the ecosystem.

Andy's takeaway for publishers was direct: make sure you're working with technology that gives you strong identity, contextual, and audience signals, and that your audience agent is compatible with the AdCP Signals Protocol.

Want to learn more about the emerging agentic advertising era and what it means for publishers? Download our guide here.

The Wider Conversation

Brian O'Kelley (Scope3) tackled the challenge of competing with walled gardens, which continue to attract advertisers because buying on them is often easier than navigating the open web. His vision leans into AI as a way to unlock new demand sources that include and go beyond traditional display while staying fully compatible with the programmatic infrastructure.

Dr. Paul Farrow (Microsoft) raised some of the most thought-provoking questions of the day around content monetization in the age of AI. When users get answers directly from LLMs without ever landing on a publisher's page, the traditional revenue flywheel starts to break. His proposal: the industry needs a systematic, marketplace-based solution to regain equilibrium for publishers of all sizes across the open web.

Scott Siegler (Amazon Publisher Services) rounded things out with a look at how the APS Prebid Adapter is helping under-resourced publishers access demand at scale, reducing the technology fragmentation and cost of ownership that hold smaller players back.

What This Means for Publishers

The tools to improve programmatic advertising are rapidly developing and evolving. The publishers who will benefit most are the ones actively working with the right technology partners to build the identity, audience, and contextual infrastructure that agentic workflows will depend on. We're proud that Optable's work is part of that conversation.

Ready to explore how agentic solutions can put your audience data to work and simplify your workflows? Book a demo today.

Rich signals, day one.

What teams actually need from an audience platform is simple: usable data. Ideally trusted and reliable.

Not in a few weeks. Not when integrations are built and tested. Immediately. 

Because until you have enough signal to build and activate audiences, the platform isn’t doing much for you.

We’re closing that gap today with Optable Attributes. A collection of enrichment capabilities so you can start building rich audience segments from day one.

Optable Attributes is:

• Audience intelligence: Instant access to a catalog of high-quality consumer signals sourced from Optable 3rd-party data partners.
• Contextual intelligence: AI-driven content classification transforms page content into meaningful interest and intent segments.
• Ad intelligence: Real-time capture of ad delivery and auction signals to build audiences from real intent and actual value.

All delivered in a single package for one flat-rate fee.

It's what turns your identity graph into an audience engine, without the operational and cost overhead.

Audience intelligence

Start with a complete picture of your visitor

Your 1st party data may tell you who someone is, but it rarely captures the full picture of how they behave, what they buy, or what they’re likely to do next.

Audience Intelligence extends that view with a turnkey 3rd-party dataset available directly inside Optable. No need to source, clean, or integrate external data. It’s already structured and ready to activate.

This dataset includes multiple signal types, spanning:

• Transactional behavior and purchase patterns
• Spending power and propensity indicators
• Brand affinities and retail activity
• Lifestyle and interest-based signals
• Motivational and intent-based attributes

The result is a stronger foundation for both planning and monetization. Teams can move quickly from raw identity to defined, sellable segments like:

• “High-value retail spenders”
• “Auto intenders with recent purchase signals”
• “Travel-ready audiences with strong booking propensity”

Traditionally, this level of enrichment requires multiple providers, each with separate contracts and CPM-based pricing. Here, it’s delivered as a single integrated dataset under a flat rate, so usage isn’t tied to cost.

Contextual intelligence

Turn content into clear, reliable signals

Contextual data is often treated as a shortcut to intent, but most systems still rely on keywords and URL patterns. That approach misses nuance.

Optable Contextual Intelligence uses LLM-driven analysis to evaluate full page content and classify it based on meaning. Our semantic engine reads the content itself, not just metadata, and maps that understanding to standardized taxonomies.

From there, it:

• Classifies content into IAB Content Taxonomy 3.1
• Extracts topics, entities, and intent signals
• Applies consistent categorization across content
• Links those signals directly to user identity

Instead of tagging pages in isolation, this builds a persistent view of what each user actually engages with over time.

That makes contextual data far more actionable. You can define audiences based on consistent behavior, not single page visits, and apply those insights directly to packaging and targeting.

It also removes operational overhead. There’s no manual tagging, syncing across vendors, and separate contextual systems to manage. The classification happens automatically and feeds directly into audience creation.

Ad intelligence

Use real buyer behavior as your strongest signal

Content suggests intent. Auction data shows how that intent is valued.

Most teams treat Prebid and GAM data as reporting, but it actually reveals something far more useful: How the market values your audience.

Optable captures these real-time signals including:

• Impressions, clicks, and viewability
• Bids, CPMs, and bidders
• Advertiser names, deal IDs, and bidding patterns

Once structured and tied directly to user records in the platform, this data becomes a valuable building blocks for segmentation.

You can build audiences such as:

• Brand loyalists: Users consistently targeted by a specific advertiser
• Vertical intent groups: Users bid on across a category like auto, travel, or finance
• High-value users: Users who consistently attract higher CPMs

These are demand-validated signals, reflecting what buyers are actually willing to spend against.

That opens up more direct ways to act on the data, from packaging PMP deals backed by bidder demand to identifying competitive targeting opportunities and building lookalike seeds from winning bids.

Instead of inferring intent, you’re working from observed market behavior.

Why our model is different

Most teams rely on a combination of point solutions to achieve anything close, namely:

• 3rd party data providers charging CPM-based fees
• A separate contextual vendor with CPM-based fees
• Internal tools or add-ons for auction analysis

Each solution has its own pricing model, integration requirements, and workflows. Bringing them together requires ongoing maintenance, with increasing cost and complexity as you scale.

Optable Attributes consolidates these capabilities into a single solution with:

• One system
• One workflow
• One flat-rate

Publishers and agencies get faster access to valuable signals, fewer dependencies across vendors, and a cost structure that doesn’t scale with volume.

The takeaway

Most platforms make you wait for your data to become useful. You deploy, collect signals, and gradually build toward something you can eventually activate.

Optable Attributes skips the cold start. You start with enrichment baked in across audience, contextual, and ad intelligence. So you can move directly into building, packaging, and activating differentiated audiences without delay.

At the same time, the economics are simpler. Instead of layering multiple vendors and CPM-based costs, you get a single system with predictable pricing and fewer moving parts.

And if you already have trusted vendors in place, Optable Attributes works alongside them, extending your current setup with additional signal and functionality. 

Accelerating the path from signal to revenue, with less friction along the way.

Getting started

Optable Attributes is available now. If you are an existing Optable customer, speak with your account team about Optable Attributes today. Or to learn more, let's chat.