The advertising technology industry, never content to let a supply chain remain simple for long, has added another set of interlocking parts to the already Byzantine process of buying digital ads.
Chalice AI, a company that builds artificial intelligence tools for media buying, announced a partnership with Equativ, an independent advertising technology platform, to embed what the companies describe as "containerized AI decisioning" into the programmatic advertising workflow. The collaboration, the companies said, will allow advertisers to deploy custom algorithms that can evaluate and bid on individual ad impressions in real time.
The announcement arrives as the advertising technology sector races to position itself around emerging standards from the IAB Tech Lab, the industry's technical standards body, including something called the Agentic Real-Time Framework. (The framework's abbreviation, ARTF, has yet to become a household word, even in households that work in advertising technology.)
"When a supply-side platform deploys AI within the auction environment using an open, standardized framework, it creates real value for advertisers," said Adam Heimlich, chief executive of Chalice AI, in a statement that contained the phrase "unbundling of programmatic," which is either a technical description or a warning, depending on one's perspective.
Curt Larson, chief innovation officer at Equativ, suggested that the partnership would give media buyers access to more granular information about where their ads actually appear — "how ads are laid out, how audiences actually engage, and what the environment really looks and feels like," as he put it.
The programmatic advertising ecosystem, which has grown steadily more complex since its emergence in the late 2000s, now encompasses a dense web of demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, data management platforms, and verification services. The addition of artificial intelligence agents operating within what the companies call "portable containers" represents the latest evolutionary step in a system that sometimes seems to exist primarily to create opportunities for additional evolutionary steps.
Original story published in Adweek: "Chalice AI and Equativ Advance AI-Powered Curation Across the Open Internet"