• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, September 28, 2026

Scope3, the company Brian O'Kelley built to measure the carbon footprint of digital advertising, renamed to Apostra last week and changed its focus. 

“Br  ands and audiences are separated by layers of intermediaries,” Anne Coghlan, COO and co-founder of Apostra, said in a video. “We asked what would advertising look like if a brand’s intent could travel everywhere it needed to fully intact.”

Coghlan called Aprostra the “first marketplace” where humans can buy and sell advertising worldwide. Traditional media like out-of-home and radio can be bought and sold alongside social, digital and wall garden platforms.

The framework uses the open-source Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) to enable direct transactions between AI agents that represent media buyers and sellers. It eliminates traditional intermediaries and, in theory, creates trust through this “non-manipulative” platform. It also aims to establish a transparent public exchange for advertising.

Too often a "campaign brief gets reduced as it moves from intent to execution," according to the company's announcement. "The ambition, context, creativity, and guardrails that make a brand distinctive are stripped away along the way, until what reaches the consumer can look very different from what the brand set out to achieve."

Agentic ad buying will require organizational changes, and some companies have already begun experimenting with using internal AI agents but have not yet figured out how to connect them to media buying, Coghlan told Business Insider.

Many of Apostra's early campaigns have run through a brand's agencies, allowing marketers to test agentic ad buying without having to change internal processes.

This type of media buying does not operate like a traditional ad auction. There are no bids on individual impressions when a page loads. Agents automate parts of the slower process of discovering, negotiating, approving and executing media deals, according to Business Insider.

O'Kelley and team built Apostra to close that gap. The agent needs to represent the brand by allowing companies and their agents to make advertising feel and act like their brand.

“What would a world look like if agents helped us put our message on everything,” O’Kelley said in the video. “Imagine if every podcast, every sub-reddit, influencer video we could have an agent figuring out exactly where and how our brand should show up or if it should show up at all.”

The advertiser's agent tells the media owner's agent what the marketer wants to achieve, and the media owner's agent answers with details about its audience and the opportunities it can offer. The agents would collaborate with humans regardless of where in the world or on what surface.

Apostra will connect agents to agents that drive media properties, influencers, cinema, linear media, chatbots and more.

Platforms and protocols will oversee the development across an agentic ecosystem.