Some partnerships start with a strategy deck. This one started over ten years ago, in Zürich, and I've watched it from three different chairs since.

I first sat across from the goTom team as a colleague, back when I was at TX Group (Tamedia, as it was then). Years later I sat across from them as a client: goTom was the system our ad sales actually ran on. Not the system on the pitch, the system the team opened every morning. And now I'm sitting across from them as a fellow founder, co-hosting together at Cannes Lions.

Same city. Same stubborn belief in trusted media. A different decade.

That history is the easy part to write about. It's also not the point. The reason it's worth your attention is what the two companies can now build together and why this particular moment makes it possible.

Two sides of the same buy

For most of the last decade, the open web ran on real-time bidding. OpenRTB did something genuinely important: it turned manual insertion orders into automated, millisecond auctions. But it also stacked the supply chain with intermediaries, opaque fees, and the quiet erosion of the publisher's direct relationship with demand. Everyone in this industry knows the tax. Most of us stopped questioning it.

The agentic shift changes the question. Instead of bidding on individual impressions through a long pipe, AI agents can now negotiate directly: a buyer's agent describing what it wants, a publisher's agent describing what it has, and the two settling terms in a shared language. The Ad Context Protocol, AdCP, built on the same communication standards as Anthropic's MCP and governed by a neutral industry body, is the language that makes that conversation possible across companies that have never integrated before. Think of it as OpenRTB for the age of agents, with one crucial difference: it's designed for direct deals, thinking and workflow automation, not just auctions.

This is exactly where C Wire and goTom turn out to be two halves of the same buy.

C Wire is the buy side. We bring the data, contextual signals with no cookies and no identifiers behind them, the creative, and the agentic buying layer that puts a brief into market and translates a brand's strategy into impact. goTom is the publisher side: the direct-sold inventory, the deals, and the order management that trusted media companies actually run their commercial operation on. On their own, those are two good products. Put them on a shared protocol, and a buyer agent can talk straight to a publisher's seller agent, discover what's available, agree the terms, apply existing commercial agreements, run the creative. All of this end to end, without three intermediaries each taking a slice on the way through.

We're early. I want to be honest about that, because the AdCP community will be standing in the same rooms we are at Cannes, and they'll know the difference between a shipped integration and an exploration. This is an exploration, a deliberate one, between two companies that already trust each other's products and have for years. That's not a small thing. Most agentic partnerships start with two strangers and a signed NDA. This one starts with a relationship.

What it's actually for

Strip away the protocol talk and the thing underneath is simple, and it's the thing both of us have believed for twenty years: the publisher's direct relationship with demand is worth protecting.

No cookies. No IDs. No black boxes. Demand meeting trusted supply directly, on what we keep calling the trusted web. Not because it's a nice slogan, but because it's the part of the internet worth buying. Agents don't have to mean more abstraction between a brand and a publisher. Done right, they mean less. The agent's job is to remove the layers, not add one more.

That's the conversation goTom and I want to have out loud at Cannes, with each other, and with the people who'll have to live with whatever this industry builds next.

Come find us

If you're on the Croisette, come argue with us in person. We're co-hosting and will have a Founder confessional session at our AdTech Chill House, 35 Rue Bivouac Napoléon. It's the kind of room where founders say the things they don't put in the keynote, which is, in my experience, where the useful conversations actually happen.

More than ten years to get to this handshake. The least we can do is have it somewhere with a view.