AgenticAdvertising.org launches Australian chapter as News Australia tips AI agents for half of ad spend

Picture a media buy where the buyer’s AI agent asks the seller’s AI agent for a proposal, the two of them haggle, and the deal goes through. Nobody has to send a “just circling back” email.

The industry is building towards that, and AgenticAdvertising.org (AAO) now has an Australian chapter to help set the rules. Its founding members come from WPP Media, News Australia, PubMatic, Mutinex, pubX, and Apostra.

Paul Oyama, head of supply and agentic trading at News Australia and one of the founders, thinks the change will come quickly.

“I think in the next 24 months or maybe by late 2028, we could see as high as or more than 50% of global ad spend going through a buyer agent or going through some kind of platform that is AI-powered,” he told Mediaweek.

Who’s at the table

Andrew Gilbert, country manager ANZ at pubX, and June Cheung, head of JAPAC at Apostra, will co-lead the local chapter.

The other founding members are Oyama, Pete Barry (VP commerce and audience solutions at PubMatic), Adam Krass (product lead at Mutinex), and Dylan Dharmadasa (GM of product at WPP Media).

“I’m here to represent publishers in this market,” said Oyama. “We’ve got, obviously, PubX, the new Apostra, renamed from Scope3. We also have PubMatic as well. So, we’ve got representatives from a wide range of the ecosystem, but we’ve come together to be able to put Australia in the spotlight as well.”

What is AdCP?

The chapter’s main job is to drive adoption of the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP). This is AAO’s open standard for how AI agents acting for advertisers talk to AI agents acting for publishers. It covers how agents find inventory, exchange proposals, execute transactions, and report results. The aim is to cut down on one-off integrations and make publisher inventory easier for advertisers to reach.

The bigger problem is fragmentation. A brand can buy through one global platform in a few clicks. Buying across independent publishers and offline channels can mean juggling several systems, workflows, and reporting formats.

Oyama describes the protocol as “the guidelines, and I guess the guardrails, if you will, for AI to be transacting through media.”

“You don’t want to be giving pure natural language sort of decision-making to an AI because, yes, it can come up with many sort of different solutions and ways to play, but the protocol standardises it,” he said.

Why Australia wants a voice

Oyama says the local market works too differently to leave its standards to overseas members.

“Australia is unique in how we trade with our agencies and brands. So, we wanted to make sure that we had a voice and came together and brought the community together,” he said.

News Corp is also sponsoring the event Oyama calls “Australia’s first real agentic advertising event.”

“We’ve had a lot of sort of broader, you know, media events and even programmatic events. So it’s great to see that we’re finally getting together to talk about agentic advertising,” he said.

“We definitely see the advantages in being sort of leading in this space in testing and learning with the protocol and really understanding, you know, what benefits this is going to bring News.”

Keeping a human in the loop

Local members can join AdCP working groups and push for standards that fit Australian market requirements. The chapter will also join discussions on transparency, accountability, and human oversight. That includes AAO’s Embedded Human Judgment framework, which builds governance into agentic workflows.

AAO was founded in October 2025. It has more than 150 member companies and has already supported early advertising transactions between AI agents using AdCP.

“Agentic is very fresh; it’s very new,” said Oyama. “So it’s a great topic to be bringing leaders from all aspects across the media landscape to talk about it, and to discuss the next evolution of media and what’s coming to the table with AI.”

If his 2028 forecast is right, Australian publishers have about two years to make sure the agents doing the buying understand how Australia trades. That’s quicker than most agency pitch processes.