Boostr’s AMP UP 2026 Event Signals New Era of “Strategic Acceleration” and Agentic Advertising for the Media Industry

NEW YORK, NY — May 2026 — Boostr, the leading advertising management platform, successfully concluded its annual ampUP 2026 conference in New York City. The event brought together the media industry’s most influential leaders to define a new era of “Strategic Acceleration,” marking a structural transition from fragmented technical systems to a future of unified, AI-driven decision-making and agentic trade.

A Gathering of Media Powerhouses. The event featured an elite assembly of decision-makers from across the global media economy. Attendees represented diverse sectors, including global news organizations, lifestyle and entertainment portfolios, TV and radio broadcasters, professional sports leagues, digital audio networks, and retail media networks. The audience comprised C-suite executives, senior vice presidents of Revenue Operations, and heads of ad technology, all focused on solving the “manual tax” and system silos that have historically hindered industry growth .

A Structural Transformation: The Dawn of AdCP and Agentic Buying

A primary focus of the summit was the introduction of Agentic Buying using Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), which is positioning agentic advertising as a fundamental structural transformation rather than incremental automation. Boostr and a leading publisher announced a real agentic buy, using the Boostr Seller Agent,  demonstrating how AdCP compresses multi-week direct-sales workflows—including RFP, negotiation, IO creation and trafficking —into a streamlined process taking only minutes via Agent-to-Agent negotiation.

Key insights regarding the AdCP shift included:

• Discoverability as Revenue: AI agents act as an orchestration layer, helping advertisers discover new inventory outside existing relationships, turning discoverability into a primary revenue lever.
• Minutes vs. Weeks: Transactions that historically took days or weeks for premium direct buys are now executed in minutes.
• The Orchestration Layer: Agents function as a sophisticated layer above existing platforms like GAM and OMS, rather than a replacement for them.
• Strategic Human Roles: As transactional execution becomes automated, human roles are shifting toward high-level strategy, relationship management, and seller-agent optimization.

MAJOR CALLOUT: The Boostr Agent Series

Shift from manual execution to strategic acceleration. The conference featured a major showcase of the Boostr Agent Series: intelligent, role-specific agents designed to automate repetitive tasks and empower teams to focus on high-impact work.

• Role-Specific Experts: These agents act as pre and post-sales experts, encompassing MP Import Agents for media plan ingestion, Trafficking Agents for ad server creative, and Campaign Delivery Agents for autonomous buyer reporting.
• The Maturity Model: Boostr outlined a three-wave intelligence roadmap, moving from initial ingestion and trafficking (Wave 1) to programmatic optimization (Wave 2) and culminating in predictive planning and agentic buying via AdCP (Wave 3).
• Human-in-the-Loop: By maintaining bounded autonomy, Boostr ensures that AI empowers experts to direct workflows while agents perform the labor, keeping actions trustworthy and governed.

Maximizing Profitability via Audience Extension

As traffic volatility on owned-and-operated (O&O) sites continues to challenge the media industry, publishers, broadcasters, resellers and Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are increasingly moving budgets toward audience extension—buying third-party inventory to follow their first-party audiences across the open web and socials. However, this shift has traditionally been plagued by manual data entry, fragmented reporting, and a lack of real-time visibility into profit margins.

Boostr’s Audience Extension feature addresses these challenges head-on. Designed to seamlessly account for external inventory from initial planning all the way through to launch, it provides automated guardrails and real-time profitability calculations. For the first time, media companies can plan, execute, and optimize off-network buys with a guaranteed focus on hitting their specific profit targets, typically a 30-40% margin.

“Many media organizations are currently ‘flying blind’ when it comes to the profitability of their audience extension campaigns,” said Patrick O’Leary, CEO of Boostr. “They might hit their delivery goals but lose money on the arbitrage. Our new feature eliminates this risk by centralizing buy-side costs and sell-side revenue in one place, allowing teams to optimize for both performance and profit simultaneously.”

Key benefits of the Boostr Audience Extension feature include:

• Automated Margin Protection: Integrated media planning tools provide pre-buy profitability calculations, preventing unprofitable deals from being sold upfront.
• Elimination of "Double-Entry" Waste: Automates the push of campaign data to DSPs and Social platforms, saving teams upwards of 12 hours per campaign by eliminating manual data syncing.
• Real-Time Arbitrage Optimization: Daily ingestion of spend and bid data lets managers track exact margin and spend incurred to run audience extension inventory in real-time, enabling immediate budget reallocation to higher-margin platforms.
• Simplified Multi-Platform Billing: Consolidates delivery data from various third-party sources into a single, clean line item for client billing and financial reconciliation.

“While legacy OMS providers focus on simple order management, Boostr is focusing on the bottom line,” added O’Leary. “Audience Extension isn't just about more reach; it's about smarter, more profitable growth.”

Scaling Efficiency with Boostr’s Self-Service Solution

To help publishers efficiently scale buyer collaboration and capture the long-tail market, Boostr unveiled its new Self-Service Solution. Traditionally, media companies have struggled with buyer collaboration hurdles, such as capturing lower-tier long-tail budgets efficiently, chasing down creative asset collections, and managing ongoing campaign delivery and performance reporting.

Boostr addresses these inefficiencies with a modular, white-labeled portal that seamlessly interacts with the core Boostr platform. This portal empowers buyers by facilitating autonomous Media Buying, Streamlined Creative Asset Collection, and direct Client Reporting equipped with interactive dashboards and data exports.

Core Use Cases

• Scaling Relationships: Easily scale client-direct and small agency relationships without increasing internal sales headcount.
• Last-Minute Budgets: Facilitate and capture last-minute ad spend automatically.
• Reseller Enablement: Provide a simplified, intuitive interface tailored for third-party resellers.
• Compliance & Trust: Deliver transparent access to satisfy complex regulatory and auditing needs.

Commitment to Excellence and Continuous Learning

The event concluded with the Client Excellence Awards, recognizing visionaries from global entertainment platforms and regional media groups for their roles as systems thinkers and early adopters in the space. Boostr also celebrated the momentum of its community, with over 175 members currently pursuing Boostr University Certifications in Analytics, Admin, and Ad Ops.

For more information about Boostr and the era of Strategic Acceleration, visit www.boostr.com. 

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