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Hi, everyone. You’re reading AI, Tech & Money. I’m Kendra Barnett, back from a two-week jaunt across central Europe, during which I consumed too many pastries and tried my hardest not to think about AI. Now, I’ve arrived back in a New York 20 degrees cooler and splashed with Mozilla ads skewering big tech’s power players! Fun!
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s going on this week.
In media: Paramount settled an antitrust lawsuit with 12 U.S. state attorneys general who’d sought to bar the entertainment giant’s planned $81 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. With that little trifle out of the way, the aisle has been cleared for the nuptials to proceed.
In AI: Meta’s Muse—the company’s new teammate-type agent capable of autonomously executing multi-step tasks on behalf of users—is garnering lots of hype, and lots of downloads. OpenAI, for its part, is reportedly pushing to develop rival capabilities. Meanwhile, execs from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Hugging Face yesterday briefed UN leaders on the security risks of AI.
In adtech: The Trade Desk wants to reprice over 15 million stock options on the heels of a substantial round of layoffs. Also, industry vet Brian O’Kelley’s one-time advertising sustainability play, Scope3, has been rebranded as Apostra. The company will pivot to focus primarily on enabling agent-to-agent ad buys. In conversation with ADWEEK, O’Kelley got testy over the suggestion that the switch-up might invite criticism. Scroll on for more on that.
The Top Line
The Quant
Rates of citations in ChatGPT responses vary significantly across verticals, according to recent data from Similarweb that evaluated responses on desktop in the U.S. in May. Prompts related to travel and hospitality produce answers with citations around 23% of the time; automotive trailed at around 20%. Meanwhile, some categories, like education and media and entertainment, see citation rates of just 4% and 6.8%, respectively.
Deep Learning: Apostra Wants to Be the Agentic Ad Layer. Does the Industry Need One?
Scope3’s transformation from a carbon emissions calculator for advertisers into an infra layer for agent-to-agent ad buying and selling is complete. This week, the company ditched its old name in favor of a new one: Apostra.
It cements a shift that’s been underway since at least early 2025, when Scope3 first announced the launch of a slate of AI agents for brand safety and an agentic advertising platform that won support from players like Amazon, Index Exchange, and LiveRamp. At that time, Scope3 positioned the offerings in service of its sustainability mission, arguing that more efficiency in media buying would translate to a lower environmental impact.
Gradually thereafter, the company stopped leaning on that narrative as the boisterous brainiac at the helm, adtech veteran Brian O’Kelley, dedicated more time and resources to building agentic advertising infrastructure. While Scope3 continued operating its sustainability business—even as the company cut headcount—he helped architect and launch an open-source standard for agent-to-agent media transactions, Ad Context Protocol (AdCP). Scope3, in turn, began scaling its agentic advertising platform, which uses AdCP to create a shared language between agents. The system helps buying agents find ad inventory, negotiate terms with sell-side agents, and then execute campaigns across various media environments, from digital to TV and out-of-home.
The company that began with the aim of giving advertisers a new signal to reduce inefficiencies across the adtech supply chain is now trying to build the machine that actually makes decisions on behalf of those advertisers.
Now, O’Kelley has largely ditched the narrative that agentic advertising is in service of a higher sustainability ethos (though it’s worth noting that Apostra will still operate the sustainability practice under the new name Scope3 by Apostra). On a Zoom call with me this week, he said that sustainability is just not hot, telling me that the tides have turned drastically under Trump’s second term and that AI is simply the biggest growth area.
He can see the irony in Scope3’s shift, though, even naming what some industry players are sure to call him out for: AI’s own environmental impact. “AI uses, I think, 11% of all the electricity in the U.S. There is no business bigger than AI,” he said, likely alluding to a 2025 study that determined data centers, not AI writ large, could consume 11.8% of total U.S. electricity by the end of this decade.
O’Kelley prickled at the idea that he could be viewed as hypocritical for ushering the company through such a change. “I don’t want to be held to a standard where trying to be good isn’t good enough, because if everyone just says, ‘Well, if I try to be good, then look what people will do—they’ll attack me for being a hypocrite.’ Then we have a cynical world where everyone’s like Donald Trump, and everyone’s like, ‘Well, what’s the point? There’s no point even trying. There’s no value trying to do the right thing, because look what happens to the people who try: they get taken down. So let’s all just be, you know, Donald Trump.’ I don’t want to be that.”
Today, Apostra’s agentic ads business is already making some headway. The core platform has managed $1.2 million in media spend over the last three months, O’Kelley estimates, primarily from large companies, with agentic buys in the U.S. and other markets including the U.K., France, Brazil, the Netherlands, and South Africa.
The proving grounds ahead will be no joke. Though agentic ad buying, in O’Kelley’s telling, is already more scaled than most realize (attributing the mismatch between reality and perception to brands’ zipped lips as they get rolling), there are likely to be some hurdles to widespread adoption. A recent survey from Digiday and Optable found that among advertisers, agencies, and publishers, 31% characterized their agentic ad readiness as “experimenting but fragmented,” while 42% said they were “early but moving quickly.” Another 2% said they were not ready at all.
What People Are Saying
O’Kelley remains bullish, noting that demand is growing and that some clients are already planning “significant expansion” for 2027.
Readiness isn’t the only unanswered question. In the backdrop is a competing standard to AdCP, the standard O’Kelley helped to develop: the IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP (Agentic Advertising Management Protocols), an open-source initiative aimed at standardizing agentic media buying. AAMP 3.0, unveiled just a day ahead of the Scope3-Apostra rebrand, pushes into the stage between an RFP and a media buy, which is a part of the lifecycle that AdCP also aims to automate. Today, AAMP and AdCP represent differing visions for the nuts and bolts needed to scale agentic advertising, but they are both racing to decide the rules of how agents discover, evaluate, negotiate, and transact media. So another potential challenge for Apostra and O’Kelley will be their ability to seed wider adoption of AdCP.
For Apostra, the new direction is a big swing, a bet that buyers and sellers need a neutral layer that can connect their agents. If Apostra’s tech works and it gains traction in the market, it could secure an indispensable place in the adtech stack.
The bigger unknown, for Apostra and for the industry as a whole, however, may be where the money flows in the world of agentic advertising. To what extent will platforms like Apostra’s be integral if every player in advertising can use open standards like AdCP or AAMP to connect their own agents?