Agentic Audiences (formerly UCP) - LiveRamp's Embedding-Based Signal Standard, Now at IAB Tech Lab

What Agentic Audiences (UCP) Is

Agentic Audiences is the data plane of agentic advertising - the standard defining how agents exchange user signals. It is not a campaign execution protocol. It defines how buyer agents, seller agents, and measurement agents share what they know about a user's intent, identity, and advertising response history without exchanging raw personal data.

The technical innovation: embeddings - compact, learned vector representations of 256 to 1,024 dimensions that encode complex user signals in a format that is simultaneously privacy-preserving, fast, and interoperable. Instead of passing thousands of raw data points, agents exchange dense vectors that capture semantic meaning. Similar user intents produce similar vectors. An agent can compare and act on these without ever resolving the underlying identity.

Three Signal Types

• Identity signals: Hashed identifiers, behavioural segments, probabilistic matches - in compressed vector form, no raw PII
• Contextual signals: What the user is doing right now - content category, time of day, device context
• Reinforcement signals: How this user or users like them have previously responded to advertising - enabling real-time model learning

AdCP defines how agents act on the control plane. Agentic Audiences defines the data plane - the signals that inform those actions. They are designed to work together. IAB Tech Lab explicitly positions UCP as the data layer that extends and enriches AdCP-based agent workflows.

The AAMP Context

On February 26, 2026, IAB Tech Lab formally named its umbrella initiative AAMP - Agentic Advertising Management Protocols. Agentic Audiences is one of seven protocol components within AAMP, alongside ARTF, Agentic Ad Objects (AdCOM), Agentic Direct, Agentic Deals, and two components in development. Understanding UCP requires understanding it as part of a coordinated infrastructure - not a standalone protocol.