Affinity, a global ad tech company operating across 10 or more markets in Asia, the United States, and Europe, announced on June 9, 2026, that it has joined the Ad Context Protocol as a Founding Member - bringing two decades of experience in advertising surfaces that traditional programmatic infrastructure was never designed to handle.

The move raises a pointed question that the agentic advertising industry has largely avoided: when AI agents begin transacting media autonomously, which surfaces will those transactions actually cover?

What AdCP is - and what it was missing

The Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) is an open standard developed by an independent nonprofit, AgenticAdvertising.org, to enable AI agents to negotiate, plan, and execute media buys directly with publisher agents. Built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), it launched on October 15, 2025 with six founding members - PubMatic, Scope3, Swivel, Triton Digital, Optable, and Yahoo - plus 23 additional launch participants. Its nine core tasks cover the full advertising lifecycle, from inventory discovery to campaign activation and reporting.

The protocol was conceived as a common technical language for autonomous systems. Instead of each media buyer building separate integrations for every platform, AdCP provides a single interface through which AI agents can discover inventory, compare pricing, and execute campaigns across different ad tech systems. That's a direct response to a structural problem: digital advertising remains fragmented across dozens of proprietary APIs, each with its own workflow, documentation, and reporting format.

What AdCP had not yet addressed was the inventory class that sits almost entirely outside that programmatic auction infrastructure - the surfaces that billions of people encounter every day before they ever open a browser tab. Browser start pages. On-device search and AI answer engines. App stores. Mobile and TV operating systems. Launcher screens. These surfaces are, according to Affinity, where commerce journeys frequently begin. And they have largely been excluded from the automated buying frameworks that define modern digital advertising, in large part because of the stricter privacy standards they operate under.

"The first generation of agentic advertising infrastructure is being designed primarily by and for the premium programmatic ecosystem. That's only half the picture," said Lavin Punjabi, CEO of Affinity. "The fraud-free surfaces which billions of people access daily and begin their commerce journeys from are browser start pages, on-device search/AI, app stores, minus one screens, etc. That's an area where two decades of experience with these surfaces gives us something real to contribute to the standard."

The surfaces Affinity brings to the table

Affinity's inventory spans a category of ad placements that the industry sometimes calls enterprise native or OEM(original equipment manufacturer) supply. These include browser homepages - the default start page a user sees when opening Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or a device-specific browser. They include the app store browse and search interfaces on iOS and Android platforms. They include the launcher screens on Android devices and connected TV operating systems, the first thing a user sees when they turn on their smart TV or unlock their phone. And they include the emerging AI answer engine surfaces where search queries are increasingly resolved through generated responses rather than ranked links.

According to Affinity, the company operates in more than 10 markets with a team of over 500 people. Affinity Global Inc. describes itself as developing privacy-first infrastructure for publishers and advertisers beyond walled gardens, helping publishers discover monetization approaches and enabling advertisers to reach audiences through touchpoints that sit outside Google, Meta, and Amazon's owned environments.

The distinction Punjabi draws - between the "premium programmatic ecosystem" and the surfaces his company operates in - reflects a structural divide that has defined digital advertising for years. Programmatic display and video advertising, which protocols like AdCP primarily emerged from, runs through real-time bidding infrastructure built around cookies, device IDs, and the ad server architectures that publishers and SSPs manage. OEM and browser surfaces operate on different data models, under different consent frameworks, with different publisher relationships.

If AdCP's open standard is written solely with display, video, and audio programmatic inventory in mind, those other surfaces do not gain the standardization benefits. Affinity's stated reason for joining AdCP as a Founding Member is to prevent that outcome - to ensure OEM and browser inventory is represented in the specification from the ground up.

Two specific areas of technical contribution

According to Affinity, its work within AdCP will concentrate on two areas.

The first is OEM and browser inventory standardization: defining how non-traditional ad surfaces are represented within the AdCP framework. This is a non-trivial technical challenge. AdCP's current data models are built around the concepts of publisher agents exposing packages of inventory for buyer agents to discover and transact. Those models were designed with display, video, connected television, audio, and digital out-of-home in mind. Representing a browser start page ad unit, or a search surface on a TV operating system, requires different data structures - different ways of expressing context, audience signal, and placement characteristics that don't map cleanly onto existing programmatic concepts.

The second is demand-supply interoperability: leveraging Affinity's position across both sides of the ecosystem to ensure AdCP works for publishers and advertisers simultaneously. This is significant because Affinity operates at the intersection of publisher monetization and advertiser activation, rather than sitting exclusively on one side of the transaction. That dual perspective matters for a protocol whose core value proposition is that a single shared language can reduce friction for both parties.

The broader agentic advertising landscape

Affinity's announcement arrives at a moment when the agentic advertising infrastructure space has become genuinely crowded. Multiple parallel standards and initiatives are advancing simultaneously, under different governance structures, with different technical approaches.

The IAB Tech Lab formally named its own umbrella agentic initiative AAMP - Agentic Advertising Management Protocols - on February 26, 2026, at the Beet Retreat event. AAMP is the overarching name for a set of standards that IAB Tech Lab has been developing across three task forces: execution protocols, interoperability standards, and an Agent Registry. As PPC Land has documented, where AdCP provides nine core tasks built on Anthropic's MCP, AAMP provides a broader three-tier agent hierarchy with seven protocol components, each mapped to existing industry standards including OpenRTB and AdCOM.

Prebid.org took stewardship of the open-source Prebid Sales Agent on January 29, 2026, in collaboration with AgenticAdvertising.org, bringing agentic advertising capabilities to publishers through the infrastructure that already powers header bidding across thousands of websites. PubMatic launched AgenticOS in early January 2026. Magnite built a seller agent into SpringServe in December 2025. Optable's Audience Agent integrated with PubMatic AgenticOS on March 12, 2026, positioning the integration as an early live demonstration of AdCP running across real programmatic infrastructure.

These deployments have one thing in common: they are concentrated in the premium programmatic inventory that was always designed for automated buying. Connected television, digital out-of-home, audio, display, video - the surfaces that SSPs and publishers have spent years building programmatic infrastructure around. The Broadsign and Draft Digital agentic OOH campaign announced in late May 2026, which ran what the companies positioned as the first fully agentic out-of-home campaign, is another example of the same pattern.

OEM and browser inventory has not been part of that conversation. Affinity's membership is a direct attempt to change that.

Industry debate has not slowed the standard's momentum

The reception to AdCP since its launch has not been uniformly positive. David Kohl warned in October 2025 that the protocol represents premature focus on automation tools before addressing fundamental structural issues in the programmatic supply chain. Ari Paparo raised concerns in November 2025 about whether agents can overcome the business problems - pricing transparency resistance, scale economics, data fragmentation - that historically prevented programmatic direct from scaling. Advertising fraud researchers have questioned whether the protocol's reliance on self-declaration creates vulnerabilities similar to those that undermined ads.txt.

Despite that criticism, the standard has continued attracting participants and generating live deployments. The IAB Tech Lab's Agent Registry reached 10 active entries by March 11, 2026, all operating under MCP. PubMatic executed a live agentic campaign in December 2025 with Butler/Till and Clubtails, reporting 40% more impressions than comparable non-agentic activity, 5.5x cost efficiency, and a 98% video completion rate. Whether those results hold across a broader range of inventory types - including the OEM and browser surfaces Affinity operates - remains to be seen.

Affinity's position within AdCP gives it a formal seat at the table where those questions are decided. The company's role is not purely advisory. As a Founding Member, Affinity is expected to contribute to the specification itself - to influence how the protocol defines and represents the inventory classes that have been absent from the standard.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The marketing implications are straightforward in theory and complicated in practice. If AdCP succeeds in standardizing agentic media buying across a broad surface area, media buyers gain a single interface for campaign activation across channels that currently require entirely separate integrations, separate vendor relationships, and separate reporting reconciliation. That reduces operational overhead - the kind of structural inefficiency that has driven interest in agentic advertising infrastructure throughout 2025 and 2026.

OEM and browser inventory represents a specific opportunity within that picture. These surfaces reach consumers at moments of intent - when they turn on a device, open a browser, or search for an app. Advertisers have long recognized the value of those moments; the difficulty has been accessing them at scale through automated buying infrastructure. Most of the large-scale deployments of OEM advertising have relied on direct insertion orders and custom integrations rather than programmatic auction mechanics. That limits who can buy, at what minimum spend levels, and with what speed.

Standardizing how those surfaces are represented within an agentic protocol could, in principle, open them to the same automated discovery-and-activation workflows that are now being built for CTV and audio. Whether that actually happens depends on whether AdCP achieves sufficient industry adoption to make publisher-side implementation worthwhile - and that remains an open question, given the competing AAMP initiative from IAB Tech Lab and the general fragmentation of the agentic standards space.

What is not open to question is that the first draft of any standard tends to shape its permanent architecture. Affinity's decision to join AdCP as a Founding Member, rather than waiting to see which standard wins, reflects a calculation that participation now is more valuable than neutrality later.

Affinity is headquartered in New York. The company's website is affinity.com.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Affinity Global Inc., a global ad tech company with over 500 employees operating in 10 or more markets across Asia, the United States, and Europe, led by CEO Lavin Punjabi. The company joins AgenticAdvertising.org, the independent nonprofit that governs AdCP.

What: Affinity has joined the Ad Context Protocol as a Founding Member. Its contribution focuses on two areas: defining how OEM and browser ad surfaces - including browser start pages, app stores, mobile and TV operating systems, launcher screens, and AI answer engines - are represented within the AdCP standard; and ensuring demand-supply interoperability across both sides of the ecosystem.

When: The announcement was published June 9, 2026. AdCP itself launched on October 15, 2025.

Where: Affinity is headquartered in New York. Its inventory operates globally across browser, mobile, and TV operating system surfaces in more than 10 markets.

Why: The existing AdCP specification was built primarily around premium programmatic inventory - display, video, CTV, audio. OEM and browser surfaces, which operate under stricter privacy standards and outside traditional programmatic auction infrastructure, have not been included in the emerging agentic standard. Affinity joined to ensure those surfaces are defined within the protocol from the outset, rather than being added as an afterthought after the core architecture is set.