Several Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks with the objective of minimizing energy consumption. For example, Sensor-MAC (S-MAC) was proposed to reduce energy consumption by introducing a duty cycle. However, S-MAC cannot handle variable loads because of its static duty cycle. Timeout-MAC (T-MAC) introduced an adaptive duty cycle to handle variable traffic loads. However, nodes that do not take part in data exchange waste energy because of continuous renewal of their timeout values. To eliminate this energy waste, we propose ADV-MAC, a MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks that introduces the concept of advertising for data contention. ADV-MAC minimizes the energy lost in idle listening while maintaining an adaptive duty cycle to handle variable loads. Additionally, ADV-MAC enables energy efficient MAC-level multicasting. We derive an analytical model for the packet delivery ratio and the energy consumption of the protocol. We verify the analytical model with simulations and use the model to choose an optimal value of the advertisement period. Simulations show that the optimized ADV-MAC provides substantial energy gains (50–70% less than T-MAC and S-MAC for the scenarios investigated) while faring as well as T-MAC in terms of packet delivery ratio and latency.