This article was first published on AgenticAdvertising.org, contributed by Adzymic.
Close to 200 leaders from brands, agencies, media owners and technology partners came together for the first community meetup for AgenticAdvertising.org, hosted by Adzymic, PubMatic and Scope3. The event also marked a major first step toward launching the Southeast Asia chapter of AgenticAdvertising.org.
While much of the early momentum has been driven by the US and Europe, Southeast Asia is now approaching its own turning point. The region's path won't simply mirror what's happened in Western markets — fragmented media landscapes, a wide range of digital maturity across countries, and diverse regulatory environments mean adoption here will likely look different, and possibly move at a different pace. But that doesn't mean the region is lagging behind in ambition. Growing interest from brands, agencies, media owners, and tech partners across the ecosystem suggests Southeast Asia is carving out its own path toward agentic advertising, rather than simply waiting to catch up.
The big theme of the night: Agentic moves from theory to practice
Across the sessions, one theme came through clearly: agentic advertising is moving from theory into operating practice.
June Cheung, Head of JAPAC at Scope3, opened the afternoon with a familiar reality: a media buyer has endless options but only so many hours in the day, so they default to the publishers they already know. Agentic advertising removes that ceiling — agents continuously evaluate every publisher, build every creative, and feed performance back across the chain, while humans keep the judgment and accountability.
Panel 1: Media owners and brands weigh in
Our opening panel brought together Raj Parekh (Mediacorp), Michele Low Richards (Stellar Ace), Gibson Camson (Carousell Media Group), and James Dinglasan (Standard Chartered), moderated by Justin Lim (Adzymic), to pressure-test what agentic advertising actually means for the people running media businesses and brand budgets today.
Panel 2: Brands and agents – Who owns the media decision?
In the following panel, we brought together panelists Bharat Khatri (Omnicom Media APAC), Emir Caglayan (WPP Media), and Sudipto Das (PubMatic), moderated by Deanson Lee (Ebiquity), to tackle who actually owns the media decision as AI agents take over more of the planning and buying workflow — the consensus being that decisions must stay with the buyer (brand or agency), not the platform, with accountability shared across foundation model providers, agent builders, operators, and approvers. Khatri described Omnicom's "Know Your Agent" governance framework (modeled on banking KYC) and shared early results from its agentic rollout — roughly 87% faster campaign setup, 70% faster resolution, and 85% faster optimization across 1,000+ campaigns — while the group agreed that open protocols like AdCP are essential to prevent walled gardens from controlling decisions, and that brands now need to market to both humans and AI agents as web traffic itself becomes increasingly agentic.
Seeing the Ad Context Protocol in action
Niki Banerjee from Scope3 introduced the AdCP mental model, before Anil Gangolli, Adzymic and Michael Thorpe, PubMatic demonstrated how agents can orchestrate an omnichannel campaign from brief to buy — including inventory discovery, creative generation, media-buy creation and publisher-side approval.
Niki broke down how AdCP actually works — think of it as the HTTP of advertising, the shared language letting buyer, seller, creative, and compliance agents talk to each other. Trust comes first: each company publishes a kind of digital ID (one for brands, one for publishers) so an agent can't just pretend to be, say, McDonald's. From there, it's brief → inventory discovery → creative build → media buy, with performance feeding back to publishers so the system gets smarter over time.
In this example, the human strategist inputs a natural language brief for Uniqlo, which is then translated into a machine-readable request. The Buyer Agent sends requests to seller agents – acting on behalf of publishers, platforms and media owners, and receives a catalogue of available products in return.
Three ways to stay involved
The evening closed on a high with Southeast Asia chapter lead Travis Teo, Co-Founder and Executive Director at Adzymic, inviting the audience to join the community. Like many founding members of AAO, Travis has been involved in shaping the Ad Context Protocol and driving pilots in the region. He shared that the protocol is in its nascent stages, and his one ask was for members of the audience to continue the conversation – not only for the evening, but to continue the conversations beyond the event.
Travis shared three easy ways to get involved:
- Join AgenticAdvertising.org: Sign up at agenticadvertising.org to become part of the broader community shaping the future of agentic advertising.
- Join the #sea-chapter on AAO's Slack channel (sign up as a member to get access)
- Start a pilot campaign: Speak to any of the organisers — Adzymic, PubMatic or Scope3 to explore your first agentic pilot.
Asia’s opportunity is now
As Travis put it in closing: Asia's opportunity is now. The protocols for agentic advertising are still being written, and everyone in the room has a role to play in writing them — piloting agentic campaigns, helping define the best practices and standards for APAC, and leading the conversation forward. With Asia's scale, diversity, and speed, the region is well placed to set its own standards rather than simply adopt someone else's. With agencies, brands, media owners, and tech providers all leaning in, the conversation doesn't end here — it continues in the AAO community, where the next generation of media buying gets built together.
