AAMP, short for Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, is the name IAB Tech Lab gives to its collection of standards, reference software and registries for advertising transactions carried out by AI agents. It exists because buyers and sellers began connecting large language model (LLM) agents to ad platforms faster than anyone agreed how those agents should describe inventory, quote prices or book orders. Rather than write a new trading language, IAB Tech Lab, the non-profit standards body behind OpenRTB and ads.txt, chose to wrap agent-friendly interfaces around specifications the industry already runs. AAMP is the label for that wrapper, and its version number, 3.0 in draft as of October 2026, tracks the programme as a whole rather than any single document.

What sits under the umbrella

AAMP is not one protocol. IAB Tech Lab describes it as three pillars, set out in a document published on February 26, 2026, when the programme was given its name to end market confusion.

The first pillar, Agentic Foundations, holds the Agentic RTB Framework (ARTF), which lets partners run code in containers inside an exchange's own infrastructure during a real-time auction, and a guardrails workstream covering sandboxing, cryptographic verification and declarations of an agent's intent. The second, Agentic Protocols, holds the buyer and seller agent software development kits (SDKs) and seven protocol components mapped onto existing standards: Agentic Audiences (built from LiveRamp's User Context Protocol), Agentic Ad Objects (AdCOM, the Advertising Common Object Model), Agentic Direct (OpenDirect), Agentic Deals (the Deals API), Agentic Bid (OpenRTB), Agentic Creative and Agentic Mobile. The third, Trust and Transparency, holds the Agent Registry, a public directory of agent endpoints.

The design choice behind all three is continuity. Alison Levin, IAB board chair and an NBCUniversal executive, summarised it at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting: "just because you design a new car, doesn't mean you need to build a new track."

How an AAMP transaction works

The reference SDKs make the mechanics concrete. Both the buyer and seller kits use a three-level hierarchy. At Level 1 sits an orchestrator called the Portfolio Manager, which on the buy side allocates budget and on the sell side manages yield and deal acceptance. Level 2 holds channel specialists (display, video, connected TV, mobile app, native on the seller side; branding, CTV, mobile, performance on the buyer side). Level 3 holds functional agents for research, pricing, availability checks, proposal review, execution and reporting.

According to the buyer agent's public repository, the open-source build runs on the CrewAI framework, with Anthropic's Opus model named as the Portfolio Manager and Sonnet models as the lower tiers in its reference architecture. Buyer agents talk to seller agents through three interfaces: Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool calls as the primary route, Agent2Agent (A2A) messages using JSON-RPC 2.0 for conversational queries, and plain REST calls for administration.

A typical buy runs in stages. A campaign brief reaches the buyer's Portfolio Manager. Research agents query seller media kits: an unauthenticated caller sees only price ranges, while a buyer that discloses its seat, agency or advertiser identity unlocks exact rates and discounts. The agents then negotiate within configured limits such as a target and maximum CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and a cap on concessions. A booked order goes through OpenDirect 2.1, and the resulting deal ID is activated in a demand-side platform (DSP) such as The Trade Desk, Display & Video 360 or Amazon DSP. From there, delivery runs through ordinary programmatic plumbing. AAMP agents negotiate and book; the impressions still clear through OpenRTB and existing ad servers.

OpenProposal and the 3.0 draft

AAMP 3.0, released for comment on September 22, 2026, adds the piece that sat between a buyer's request for proposal (RFP) and a signed order. Its core object, OpenProposal, is a machine-readable offer that a seller's agent can publish unprompted (a "standard" proposal) or build in reply to a brief (a "custom" proposal).

The draft runs to 71 fields under 11 headers, grouped into merchandising, optimisation, commitment and reconciliation. Each line item is self-contained and belongs to exactly one channel: display, video, audio, CTV, digital out-of-home or native. Every field carries one of seven mutability markers. According to the specification, 29 fields are seller-set, 12 are selectable from a seller-declared menu, 5 are settable within declared bounds (geography, device, daypart, frequency cap and commitment), 3 are supplied by the buyer, 11 are derived, 6 are immutable and 2 mixed. Only 3 fields, the "requestable" ones, require the other side to respond.

The ratio is the argument. If a seller declares options and price deltas up front, a buying agent performs "constraint satisfaction rather than negotiation," according to the specification.

Execution still hands off downstream through a transaction_mechanism field. A direct buy maps to OpenDirect 2.1 orders and lines; programmatic guaranteed maps to OpenDirect plus the Deals API; a private marketplace deal maps to the Deals API and OpenRTB 2.6; open market inventory maps to an OpenRTB auction with no deal. The repository, tagged v3.0-draft-1, warns against building production systems on it.

Origin and evolution

The pieces predate the name. LiveRamp donated its User Context Protocol to IAB Tech Lab on November 3, 2025. ARTF opened for public comment on November 13, 2025, and the Deals API followed on December 5, 2025, before reaching final status on February 6, 2026.

On January 6, 2026, IAB Tech Lab published an agentic roadmap that extended OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect and VAST with MCP, A2A and gRPC bindings instead of new standards. "The fastest and smartest way forward is to build on an existing shared foundation, not introduce multiple new standards," Anthony Katsur, IAB Tech Lab's chief executive, said at the time. The oldest commits in the current public buyer and seller repositories are dated January 18 and 19, 2026.

The umbrella was then the "Agentic Advertising Initiative." Katsur renamed it AAMP on February 26, 2026, timed to the Beet.TV Beet Retreat. The Agent Registry reached ten entries on March 11, all MCP servers, including Amazon Ads MCP. Version 2.0 arrived in April 2026; the repositories' v2.0 tags are dated April 13 (buyer) and April 17 (seller), and it added transaction types including agentic private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed deals.

AAMP 2.3, released on July 30, 2026, addressed what IAB Tech Lab called "CPM hallucination," an agent producing a confident price where pricing data was missing. It added a pricing provenance field, an optional vendor approval gate linked to the IAB Diligence Platform, deployment templates for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and nearly 5,000 unit tests. Version 3.0 followed in September.

Why it matters to marketers

For buyers, the promise is breadth. A human team reviews proposals from 10 to 20 publishers per campaign, Barnaby Edwards of IAB Tech Lab wrote in September 2026, while most sellers never see the brief. For publishers, a seller agent is a way to be legible to a buyer agent at all.

Integration cost is the other argument. Jochen Schlosser, Adform's chief technology and product officer, estimated that a custom SSP deals integration takes 250 to 350 days of work, against about 50 on a shared standard, figures he presented as estimates.

Limitations and disputes

The largest dispute is with the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), which launched on October 15, 2025 under Brian O'Kelley's Scope3 and divided the industry. A popular framing casts AdCP as the planning layer and AAMP as the impression layer. Shailley Singh, IAB Tech Lab's chief operating officer, rejected that in August, listing 13 functions on which the two overlap, from natural-language briefs to agent registries. "MCP is a communication substrate; it does not reconcile their advertising semantics," Singh wrote.

Usage is thin. Schlosser said in September that neither protocol runs at scale and that AAMP's dependence on OpenRTB entities "has a price," since several large platforms do not use OpenRTB. Magnite's chief executive, Michael Barrett, put 2027 agentic spend at $600 million to $700 million, a small fraction of programmatic budgets. Agents also negotiate rather than bid in real time; in Schlosser's words they "can only do rate card fast."

The 3.0 draft is incomplete by its own account. Machine-readable schemas will follow the first revision, seven open questions remain (among them that the format registry has no audio, CTV or out-of-home entries, and that cross-channel guarantees cannot yet be compared), and governance roles and decision rules were still blank on October 24. Even the name wobbles: some IAB material calls it the "Agentic Ad Management Protocol," singular.

AAMP versus adjacent terms

  • AdCP: a rival agentic protocol governed outside IAB Tech Lab, built natively on MCP with its own task vocabulary rather than mapped onto OpenRTB and OpenDirect.
  • ARTF: one component inside AAMP, concerned with running containerised code during real-time auctions, not with planning or negotiation.
  • MCP: Anthropic's general-purpose protocol for connecting models to tools. AAMP agents use it as transport; it carries no advertising semantics.
  • Other AAMPs: outside ad tech the acronym belongs to the American Association of Meat Processors, which runs an annual trade show, and to AAMP Global, a vehicle electronics aftermarket company. Neither is related.

Recent developments

The 3.0 comment window was due to close on October 22, 2026. A day later, IAB Tech Lab extended it to November 10, citing "overwhelming demand," which stretches the window from 30 to 49 days. "Wow! Public comment on AAMP 3.0 and OpenProposal has been immense!" Katsur wrote. Neither he nor IAB Tech Lab gave a count. As of today the OpenProposal repository showed 99 open issues and 9 open pull requests, a figure that includes IAB Tech Lab's own tracking issues. Machine-readable schemas are now likely to slip until after the extended deadline.

Timeline

  • November 3, 2025 - LiveRamp donates the User Context Protocol to IAB Tech Lab, later renamed Agentic Audiences.
  • November 13, 2025 - Agentic RTB Framework v1.0 opens for public comment.
  • December 5, 2025 - Deals API v1.0 opens for public comment.
  • January 6, 2026 - IAB Tech Lab publishes its agentic roadmap, extending OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect and VAST with MCP, A2A and gRPC.
  • January 18-19, 2026 - Earliest commits in the current public buyer and seller agent repositories.
  • February 6, 2026 - Deals API reaches final status.
  • February 26, 2026 - The programme is named AAMP, with three pillars.
  • March 11, 2026 - Agent Registry reaches ten entries, all MCP servers.
  • March 2026 - Kochava opens its AAMP workspace to public beta.
  • April 13 and 17, 2026 - v2.0 tags on the buyer and seller agent repositories; AAMP 2.0 adds agentic PMP and programmatic guaranteed transaction types.
  • July 30, 2026 - AAMP 2.3 adds pricing provenance and a vendor approval gate.
  • August 20, 2026 - Shailley Singh lists 13 functions shared by AAMP and AdCP.
  • September 22, 2026 - AAMP 3.0 and OpenProposal v3.0-draft-1 published for comment.
  • October 23, 2026 - Comment period extended from October 22 to November 10, 2026.

Summary

  • Who: IAB Tech Lab develops AAMP, led publicly by CEO Anthony Katsur and COO Shailley Singh, with buyers, sellers and vendors such as Adform, Kochava, PubMatic and Amazon implementing or registering agents.
  • What: An umbrella of standards, open-source buyer and seller agent SDKs and an agent registry that lets AI agents discover inventory, compare proposals, negotiate and book media using existing specifications such as OpenRTB, OpenDirect and the Deals API.
  • When: Components appeared from November 2025, the name arrived on February 26, 2026, version 2.3 on July 30, 2026, and the 3.0 draft on September 22, 2026, with comments now open until November 10, 2026.
  • Where: Across programmatic channels including display, video, CTV, audio, mobile apps and digital out-of-home, with code and comment processes hosted publicly on GitHub.
  • Why: To stop agentic buying from fragmenting into incompatible private integrations, and to give agents a structured, priced and auditable way to transact instead of improvising from natural language.