Agentic Alphabet Soup

Another day, another attempt at making sense of agentic AI.

On Tuesday, the IAB Tech Lab released its Agentic Roadmap, a framework designed to help the industry scale agentic buying and selling without rewiring existing workflows. Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur says the new road map will minimize fragmentation and confusion across the ad ecosystem as agentic workflows become more common.

Godspeed.

But the push for agentic standards isn’t limited to the Tech Lab. Late last year, a consortium of ad tech companies launched AdCP to create a lingua franca that standardizes AI-driven ad buying across platforms.

The newly unveiled Agentic Roadmap builds on established standards, including Model Context Protocol and the Tech Lab’s Agentic RTB Framework and Global Privacy Protocol, just to name a few.

The IAB Tech Lab is also making a significant (but unspecified) engineering investment focused on AI development, since money talks louder than buzzwords.

Raking In The Dough

At CES on Tuesday, Omnicom Media unveiled a new tie-up with Walmart to connect the retailer’s purchase data to the holdco’s influencer efforts on Instagram.

Influencer agency Creo will use the combined insights to matchmake between brands and creators through its Influencer Discovery Agent tool, which launched over the summer, Digiday reports.

Pairing purchase data with social media popularity is hardly a new idea. Omnicom inked a similar deal with Walmart last year to help secure brand deals with TikTok influencers known to boost store sales.

By adding Meta to the mix, Omnicom hopes to widen its access to creators and get a better sense of which ones inspire real business outcomes.

For example, it makes sense for Bimbo Bakeries USA, an early adopter of Creo’s Influencer Discovery Agent tool, to work with home baker influencers or, say, parent-type accounts. But a clearer connection to purchase data might reveal that a biker-photographer account actually performs best.

Data doesn’t lie.

Sparking Change

Ads will begin appearing in AI chatbot experiences not unlike the way in which we fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

(Didn’t have an ad tech/“The Fault in Our Stars” crossover on your 2026 bucket list, did you?)

Late last year, talk of chatbot-run ad campaigns began to spread throughout the industry, from a new wave of small startups to speculation about OpenAI’s plans.

And now, just one week in 2026, that buzz is already building. After testing ads last fall, Walmart has announced that it will begin running ads within its AI shopping agent, Sparky.

The ads will appear as “sponsored prompts” in response to customer requests and based on their known buying history with Walmart, Adweek reports.

For advertisers, Walmart has another chatbot tool that it calls Marty, an AI avatar that analyzes sponsored search campaigns and, based on performance, recommends bidding changes and new keywords that are most likely to perform.

Marty is in a beta period now, but all of Walmart’s advertisers will have access to the tool within the first half of this year.

But Wait! There’s More

The Trade Desk has publisher support for OpenAds from The Guardian, Hearst, BuzzFeed and others. [release]

PMG acquires influencer marketing agency Digital Voices. [release]

DoubleVerify is tapping into IMDb data to give buyers a better understanding of media quality. [Adweek]

The VAB is recommending new standards for video ad guarantees. [release]

You’re Hired!

Julia Beizer joins Microsoft AI as corporate VP of content product after more than eight years in executive roles at Bloomberg Media. [LinkedIn post]