Optable and Goodway Group yesterday announced a partnership that places agentic AI at the center of audience planning, campaign activation, and connected commerce execution - a significant step in an industry increasingly building autonomous workflows to replace fragmented manual processes.

The announcement, dated April 27, 2026, positions Optable as a key infrastructure partner powering Goodway Group's audience solution. According to the press release, the platform is already in use by more than 70 Goodway Group team members, a deployment scale that sets this deal apart from most agentic advertising announcements that remain at the testing or pilot stage.

The core problem being addressed

Agencies across the industry face three compounding pressures: signal loss as third-party identifiers degrade, fragmented audiences scattered across disconnected data environments, and operationally complex campaign execution that still relies heavily on manual stitching between platforms. Those pressures are not hypothetical. The erosion of reliable identity signals has driven a wave of partnerships across the programmatic landscape throughout 2025 and into 2026, with platforms, agencies, and data providers each attempting to secure alternative paths to addressability.

Goodway Group is a global marketing services company described in the announcement as family-owned and independently operated, with nearly a century of business history. The firm works across commerce, consulting, and media connection, serving brands seeking what it describes as measurable business outcomes rather than purely impression-based results.

Optable, headquartered in Montreal and founded in 2020, operates what it calls an Agentic Audience Platform - a system built to connect identity resolution, data collaboration, and campaign activation within a single environment. According to the company, the platform's mission is to help publishers, agencies, and brands securely connect audience data and translate it into more relevant and performant advertising. Optable employs between 11 and 50 people according to available records and has been an active participant in the broader agentic advertising standards ecosystem since October 2025, when the Ad Context Protocol launched with six founding members including Optable itself.

What the partnership actually does

At the technical level, the partnership allows Goodway Group to connect transaction-based identifiers directly into its media ecosystem. This is a meaningful capability. Most agencies have access to some form of conversion or transaction data, but that data typically sits in a separate environment from the tools used to plan and activate media. The gap between insight and execution has historically required manual export, transformation, and re-import steps that slow down campaign decisions and introduce error.

According to the announcement, Optable's platform unifies identity, activation, and data collaboration workflows into a single system. The result, in theory, is a closed loop: commerce data flows into audience planning, planning connects directly to activation, activation drives media execution, and measured outcomes feed back into the next planning cycle. That model - from signal to outcome across partners, platforms, and channels without manual handoffs - is precisely what the agentic advertising infrastructure being developed through IAB Tech Lab's AAMP initiative is designed to enable at scale.

"Agencies today are being asked to operate at a level of speed and accountability that their underlying systems were never designed to support," said Andrew Dumas, Chief Business Officer at Optable. "By bringing agentic workflows into Goodway Group's audience platform, we are enabling their teams to connect data, intelligence, and activation seamlessly, driving better performance while maintaining control and transparency."

The emphasis on "control and transparency" matters. As IAB Tech Lab's Agent Registry has demonstrated, one of the persistent questions around agentic advertising systems is who remains accountable when agents make decisions autonomously. The Optable-Goodway architecture appears to be designed with human oversight preserved - agents accelerate execution but do not replace human judgment entirely.

Multi-agent architecture and third-party integration

One of the more technically significant aspects of the deal is its approach to AI agent interoperability. According to the announcement, Goodway Group plans to deploy not only Optable's own agentic tooling but also its own proprietary AI agents as well as best-of-breed agents from third-party partners. Those proprietary agents will run on Optable's flexible platform and interoperate with Goodway's custom planning tools.

This design creates a multi-agent environment where different agents - some from Goodway, some from Optable, some from external partners - operate within a single interoperable system. Buyer agents from partner companies can be brought directly within the Optable platform to maximize insights across partners. The architecture aligns with the direction the broader industry has been building toward: AdRoll and PubMatic demonstrated cross-platform agent-to-agent communication on April 23, 2026, and Optable's own Audience Agent was integrated into PubMatic's AgenticOS in March 2026 as one of the first live demonstrations of the Advertising Context Protocol running across real programmatic infrastructure.

That PubMatic integration, announced March 12, 2026, allowed buyers to autonomously discover, build, and activate publisher first-party audience data without the underlying data leaving the publisher environment - a privacy-preserving design that Optable has consistently positioned as central to its platform philosophy. The Goodway Group deal extends that philosophy into the agency layer.

"Connected commerce requires a more unified approach to data and activation across disparate ecosystems," said Mike Wolk, SVP of Growth and Partnerships at Goodway Group. "Optable gives us the ability to execute with greater speed and precision, helping us deliver enhanced and agile solutions for our clients as the ecosystem continues to evolve."

Connected commerce as the strategic frame

Goodway Group is explicitly positioning itself within what the announcement calls "connected commerce" - a model where data, media, and activation are unified into a single outcome-driven system rather than managed as separate disciplines. This is a strategic bet on the direction of retail and brand advertising, where the purchase funnel is increasingly measured end-to-end rather than at discrete touchpoints.

The partnership enables closed-loop measurement tied to real business outcomes. Conversion data feeds directly into planning and activation workflows, enabling more precise targeting and faster decision-making. That direct connection between commerce data and activation - rather than relying on modeled or probabilistic audience signals - is what allows Goodway to operate accountably in a media environment where results are increasingly demanded rather than estimated.

By connecting transaction identifiers into its media ecosystem, Goodway gains the ability to match real customer behavior to media exposure and then use those matches to inform future buys. This is technically more demanding than building audiences from third-party segments, but it is also more defensible as privacy regulations tighten and third-party signal availability continues to decline. The fragmentation of identity across programmatic infrastructure has been a central concern for the industry for several years, and Goodway's investment in a unified identity and activation layer through Optable represents a structural response.

Scale and implications for the agency market

The 70-plus team members already using the platform as of the announcement date is a meaningful deployment figure. Agentic advertising announcements frequently describe capabilities that remain theoretical or limited to controlled tests. The Optable-Goodway partnership, by contrast, describes a platform already embedded in day-to-day campaign execution and audience intelligence work across more than 70 operators within a single agency.

That scale also implies operational integration of a meaningful depth. Streamlining campaign execution and improving audience intelligence quality are not outcomes achievable from surface-level tool access. The platform appears embedded in workflow - in how Goodway's teams actually plan campaigns, evaluate audience quality, and optimize for outcomes - rather than sitting as a standalone analytics layer.

For the broader marketing community, the Goodway-Optable deal raises a practical question: at what point does the operational advantage of agentic activation become a competitive disadvantage for agencies that have not made similar infrastructure investments? The pace of deployment across the industry has been uneven. Magnite embedded its seller agent into SpringServe in December 2025, Yahoo DSP launched agentic capabilities in January 2026, and Amazon Ads moved its MCP Server to open beta in February 2026. The agency side has been slower to move. Goodway's partnership positions the firm ahead of most independent agencies on that dimension.

Optable's trajectory in the agentic ecosystem

The Goodway deal is the third significant partnership Optable has announced in 2026. The company's Audience Agent was integrated into PubMatic's AgenticOS on March 12, 2026, enabling buyers to autonomously discover and activate publisher first-party audience data. Earlier in the year, Optable also announced a partnership with PubMatic to advance agentic audience discovery specifically across AgenticOS infrastructure. And in March 2026, the IAB Tech Lab Agent Registry listed the Optable Audience Agent as the only entry with a Private deployment classification among 10 total entries - a distinction that reflects the company's privacy-preserving architecture, where audience data stays within the platform rather than being transferred externally.

That consistency across product architecture, standards involvement, and commercial partnerships suggests a deliberate strategy: build infrastructure that is interoperable across the agentic advertising stack while retaining the data security properties that publishers and agencies increasingly require. The Goodway Group partnership is the agency-side expression of that strategy. It is also a test. Deploying agentic workflows at an operational level - across 70 team members managing real campaigns for real advertisers - creates feedback that controlled tests cannot generate. What works at scale, what requires human intervention, what produces unexpected outcomes: those findings will shape how Optable and Goodway develop the platform from here.

Whether the performance gains translate into demonstrable client outcomes - and whether those outcomes can be consistently attributed to the agentic infrastructure rather than other campaign variables - remains to be seen. The announcement describes the capability. The evidence of results will accumulate over time.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Optable, a Montreal-based Agentic Audience Platform founded in 2020, and Goodway Group, a global independent marketing services company with nearly a century of operating history. The announcement cites Andrew Dumas, Chief Business Officer at Optable, and Mike Wolk, SVP of Growth and Partnerships at Goodway Group.

What: A partnership that embeds Optable's agentic AI workflows into Goodway Group's audience solution, enabling the agency to connect transaction-based identifiers into its media ecosystem, unify identity and activation, and deploy both proprietary and third-party AI agents within a single interoperable platform. More than 70 Goodway Group team members are already using the system.

When: The partnership was announced on April 27, 2026. Platform deployment was already underway at the time of announcement.

Where: Optable is headquartered in Montreal. Goodway Group operates as a global marketing services company. The partnership operates across the connected commerce ecosystem, spanning partners, platforms, and channels.

Why: Third-party signal loss, audience fragmentation, and manually intensive campaign workflows are creating operational pressure on agencies. The partnership aims to replace fragmented, multi-platform processes with agent-driven execution that moves from data insight to media activation without manual handoffs, while maintaining closed-loop measurement tied to real business outcomes.

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