Ad tech glossary

Agentic Audiences

Technical definition

An open IAB Tech Lab standard for AI agents to describe, request and exchange audience signals in a privacy-preserving way. Formerly known as the User Context Protocol.

The ADLINGO translation

A standard way for an agent to say "I want to reach people like this" without passing around personal data. Audience targeting has always been a mess of segment names, taxonomies, and IDs that only mean something inside one platform. This gives agents a shared way to describe who they want to reach. Same idea, new name: it used to be called the User Context Protocol.

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Where this shows up

AI: What we owe the team
Agentic Advertising · Featured

AI: What we owe the team

I'm clocking two kinds of advertising executives right now: Ones who treat AI like a procurement decision, and the ones treating it like a leadership test. One buys tools. The other builds teams that know how to use them.

The RFP Oracle
Agentic Advertising ·

The RFP Oracle

The ad tech sales season is wrapping up for 2026. AI dominated everything the market responded to this year, and it was the most predictable trend ever. All we had to do was pay attention to what the agencies were asking.