Brian O'Kelley bets ad buying becomes a negotiation between two AI agents

The pricing is the part of this that commits the company to something. Adtech intermediaries usually earn a share of what flows through them. Apostra says it charges no transaction fees and takes no percentage of media spend, and will instead sell add-on "intelligence capabilities" such as campaign proposal evaluation, negotiation support, catalog integration and currency handling ^[10]. Every dollar of revenue then depends on a buyer choosing to pay for one of those features.

The complaint driving the product is narrower than a general grievance about waste. O'Kelley told CMO Insider that advertising has been held back by fragmented media infrastructure, manual processes and a programmatic market organised around real-time bidding but not optimised for the most highly valued placements ^[3]. "You can't buy anything that's not a rectangle with a cookie," O'Kelley said ^[4]. The channels Apostra points at are linear TV, in-store audio, creators and clippers ^[5], plus walled-garden social platforms, podcasts and out-of-home ^[6].

Instead of software bidding on individual impressions, the agents are meant to automate the slower work of discovering, negotiating, approving and executing deals ^[7]. Apostra says publishers gain access to more advertiser demand and cut the cost of selling their space ^[11]. In one case O'Kelley described, a media partner's agent posts proposed ads into a Slack channel for a human employee to review ^[12].

The volume on the table is small. Apostra said it is already running seven-figure campaigns, and O'Kelley said an unnamed major brand began with a $1 million US campaign in April before expanding the experiment into several other markets and channels ^[9]. A marketer choosing this quarter between another DSP seat and an integration project has that to weigh.

This is the third identity for one cap table, and the record partly bears that out. O'Kelley cofounded CMDTY in 2019, which became Waybridge and ran a supply-chain platform tracking the movement of raw materials ^[15]. Scope3 began as his side project measuring the carbon impact of digital advertising, and Waybridge returned some of its $30 million Series B to its investors, who reinvested $20 million from a seed round into Scope3 ^[16]. Scope3 raised $60 million in total, O'Kelley said ^[17]. About a third of that capital came from the investors of the company he stepped away from ^[18].

The earlier pivots left a track record. O'Kelley was credited with helping invent the ad exchange at Right Media, which sold to Yahoo shortly after he left; he had been fired from his chief technology role there after telling the Right Media board not to take the deal ^[13]. He then built AppNexus, which AT&T bought for a reported $1.6 billion in 2018 ^[14]. The trade press calls him the "godfather of adtech" ^[19].

One vendor has priced itself for a market in which agents negotiate; nothing in the record shows buying is moving there. AdCP was written last year by a consortium of adtech companies including Scope3 ^[6], and Apostra built the adapters to the large platforms itself ^[8]; whether those platforms put their own agents on the far side of them is their call.