IAB Tech Lab, the nonprofit standards body for digital advertising, announced AAMP 3.0 on September 22, 2026, the latest release of its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols framework, introducing a specification called OpenProposal that governs how buyer and seller software agents exchange and evaluate advertising proposals before a purchase commitment is made.

In Short

IAB Tech Lab published a new rulebook, called OpenProposal, that tells computer programs how to describe an advertising package for sale so that a different computer program, working for a buyer, can read it and compare it against a campaign brief. It matters because right now a media team can only look at proposals from a handful of publishers, while software could check thousands, but only if every publisher describes what they are selling in the same structured way. The rulebook is open for public feedback until October 22, 2026, and nothing in it becomes an official standard until that comment period closes and IAB Tech Lab publishes a final version.

What the specification addresses

The specification arrived as a draft rather than a finished standard. According to the GitHub repository IAB Tech Lab published alongside the announcement, the current version carries a tag of v3.0-draft-1 and the repository's own language is direct about its status: "This is a draft. Nothing here is a ratified IAB Tech Lab standard. Do not build production systems against it expecting stability." The public comment period runs from September 22 through October 22, 2026, and every comment filed during that window receives a written disposition, logged in the repository as accepted, accepted with modification, rejected with reason, or deferred.

The gap AAMP 3.0 targets sits between two points in a media transaction that already have mature standards on either side. Auctions, deal creation, measurement and delivery are governed by established IAB Tech Lab specifications such as OpenRTB, OpenDirect and the Deals API. What has never had a comparable standard is the stretch between a request for proposal and a buy commitment, a stage that, according to IAB Tech Lab's press release, "has historically been handled largely through human and manual workflows."

That manual handling produces a bandwidth problem rather than a quality problem, according to a blog post published by Barnaby Edwards, Senior Director of Product Marketing at IAB Tech Lab, on the organization's website. Edwards wrote that a media team at an agency or brand may have time to evaluate proposals from 10 or 20 publishers for a single campaign, while hundreds or even thousands of other publishers never see the brief at all. Publishers face a mirrored constraint: they have to choose which requests for proposal they have the bandwidth to respond to, and even the responses they do send may not be a perfect match for the brief, even when they come close enough to be viable.

Edwards illustrated the scale gap with a comparison the blog post frames visually: without the specification, a media team might realistically review proposals from 10 to 20 publishers, while the post describes a scenario in which "hundreds of publishers can respond to a brief" once agents can process the volume. The consequence, in Edwards' framing, is that media plans "can sometimes depend too heavily on familiar relationships and last year's choices," which he links to unrealized publisher revenue, limited competition on the buy side, and strategies that do not reach the full available market.

Anthony Katsur, chief executive officer of IAB Tech Lab, framed the same problem in the press release announcing AAMP 3.0. "As agents take on more of the work in media planning and buying, the industry needs a common framework for the RFP and proposal process," Katsur said. "OpenProposal fills a major gap between a buyer's brief and a buy commitment, giving buyer and seller agents a standardized way to exchange and evaluate opportunities. By connecting that process to the standards the industry already uses for execution, AAMP 3.0 creates a foundation for agentic workflows across the media buying lifecycle."

Inside the OpenProposal object

OpenProposal is described in IAB Tech Lab's press release as the core AAMP 3.0 object, and the GitHub repository elaborates on what that object is meant to do: it is "the descriptive specification for what is being bought and sold, engineered so a buying agent can parse and evaluate it at machine speed." The repository states that the object pulls through from an initial brief to binding commercial terms and functions as "the canonical object a seller manages alongside its OMS and ad server."

A proposal built to the specification can describe its contents, audience, commercial terms, guarantees, execution requirements, transaction eligibility and settlement references, according to the press release. It can represent either a standard package a publisher already offers or a custom response assembled for a specific brief. The distinction matters, Edwards' blog post argues, because a proposal is more than an available impression or a price; a buyer also needs to know whether an offer meets campaign requirements, supports the correct measurement, avoids prohibited adjacency, and can actually be executed as promised.

The specification organizes that information into eleven field headers grouped under four categories, according to Edwards' post:

  • Merchandising: Identity and Lifecycle, Agent Comprehension, Inventory composition, Audience reach, and Creative Requirements
  • Optimization: Targeting Envelope
  • Commitment: Commercial Terms, Guarantees, Transaction Eligibility
  • Reconciliation: Executive, Settlement Reference

The GitHub repository provides a more granular figure underneath those eleven headers: the specification contains 71 fields in total, and of those, only 3 require what the repository calls "a round trip with the counterparty" - meaning negotiation between buyer and seller. The repository frames that ratio directly as a design claim under test: "Composition is constraint satisfaction, not negotiation. Of 71 fields, only 3 require a round trip with the counterparty. That ratio is the design claim the draft is asking you to test."

Two further structural principles appear in the repository's guidance for reading the specification. First, "no inheritance": every line item in a proposal is described as fully self-contained, meaning a field never takes its value from a parent proposal or a sibling line item. Second, every field carries exactly one mutability marker, chosen from a set of seven: immutable, seller-set, selectable, settable, supplied, requestable or derived. According to the repository, that marker is what tells a buying agent whether it can act on a field unilaterally or must treat it as fixed.

The specification is designed to be transaction-type-agnostic, according to the press release, meaning it can support direct insertion orders, linear gross rating points and cost per point, programmatic guaranteed deals, preferred deals, and open auction. It is also described as channel-agnostic, with planning and buying enabled across open web display, connected television, mobile apps, audio, out-of-home, linear television and the walled gardens operated by major platforms. OpenProposal does not replace existing IAB Tech Lab execution standards, the GitHub repository notes; instead, each line item lands in whichever execution standard its transaction_mechanism field maps to, among OpenDirect 2.1, the Deals API, or OpenRTB 2.6.

How the lifecycle is meant to work

IAB Tech Lab's press release describes a seven-stage media lifecycle that AAMP 3.0 is built to support, running from a publisher first making inventory visible through to reporting on delivered performance:

  • Publish: Sellers publish a catalog of public packages that can be browsed, while retaining some products for custom proposals.
  • Discover: Buyer agents retrieve available public packages, enabling inventory discovery before a negotiation begins, or submit a full brief to get a custom proposal.
  • Compare: Buyer agents evaluate and rank opportunities against a declared brief, creating the ability to process information from a broader set of publishers than would be practical through manual evaluation alone.
  • Qualify: Agents evaluate availability and fit for the specific audience, flight and requirements of a media plan.
  • Negotiate: When needed, buyer and seller agents can negotiate custom terms while maintaining a reference to the original published offer.
  • Bind and Execute: Transactions can be executed using the existing standards and infrastructure of the digital advertising ecosystem.
  • Report: Performance can flow back through existing reporting standards, allowing results to be evaluated against the original objectives and commitments of the plan.

The common thread across those stages, the press release states, is AdCOM, the Advertising Common Object Model, which provides shared vocabulary so that information represented when a buyer first discovers a proposal stays consistent as the opportunity moves through planning, negotiation, execution and reporting.

The specification's own explanation of one of its consistency mechanisms, idempotency, is spelled out in the press release in plain terms: "an instruction can be sent twice without happening twice; so when an agent retries a request it didn't get an answer to, the result is confirmation of the original order rather than a duplicate." The press release states that AAMP agent software development kits continue to harden what it calls deterministic guardrails governing pricing, ad packages, orders and media buy details, alongside efforts to increase trust in agent identities and strengthen that idempotent behavior as agents operate at greater speed and scale.

Where OpenProposal sits inside the broader AAMP structure

AAMP 3.0 does not stand alone. It is the latest release inside a framework IAB Tech Lab has been assembling in public stages since the closing weeks of 2025. PPC Land reported that the organization unveiled a comprehensive agentic roadmap on January 6, 2026, extending OpenRTB, AdCOM, OpenDirect, VAST and the Deals API with newer execution protocols including Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent and gRPC, rather than introducing an entirely separate transaction layer. Katsur stated at the time that "the fastest and smartest way forward is to build on an existing shared foundation, not introduce multiple new standards that create fragmentation."

That January roadmap generated coverage across multiple components in isolation, and PPC Land documented that the organization moved on February 26, 2026, to give the entire initiative a formal name and structure. AAMP was defined at that point as three pillars: Agentic Foundations, Agentic Protocols and Standards, and an Agent Registry for trust and transparency. Buyer and Seller Agent SDKs, already built on AdCOM and OpenDirect, were folded into that structure alongside the Agentic RTB Framework, which IAB Tech Lab had released for public comment on November 13, 2025.

Subsequent releases inside the AAMP framework have layered additional capability on top of that foundation. PPC Land covered AAMP 2.3, an update the organization positioned as hardening guardrails against agents fabricating ad prices, and the Agent Registry itself has grown as a discovery layer; PPC Land reported that the registry reached 10 entries, including Amazon, and gained a three-tier deployment classification distinguishing remote, local and private agents. OpenProposal extends that same architecture one stage earlier in the buying process, connecting to the standards already used across execution once a proposal has moved from evaluation to commitment.

The Deals API referenced throughout AAMP's documentation is itself a relatively recent addition to the IAB Tech Lab stack. PPC Land reported that the organization released the Deals API specification version 1.0 for public comment on December 5, 2025, with its own comment period running through January 31, 2026. That specification addresses a related but distinct problem: giving deal terms a common structure so that different supply-side and demand-side platforms stop describing the same deal with incompatible notation, a friction that Hillary Slattery, Senior Director of Programmatic Product Management at IAB Tech Lab, described in the specification's accompanying blog post as requiring what she called telepathic decoding across systems.

Industry reaction

Three named industry figures were quoted in IAB Tech Lab's press release describing how OpenProposal fits into work already underway at their organizations.

Michael Palmer, Global Vice President, Emerging Technologies at WPP Media, connected the release to the industry's broader movement from experimentation toward production use. "By providing full agentic coverage for all existing IAB Tech Lab standards, while at the same time standardizing agent authentication and authorization protocols, AAMP 3.0 delivers a transaction-ready framework that will aid our industry's movement from proof-of-concept tests towards the wide-spread use of AI Agents in media transactions," Palmer said.

Mike Treon, Head of CTV Strategy at PMG, described what changes for a planning team specifically. "Agentic planning gives us the opportunity to evaluate a much broader range of media opportunities and information when we build a plan," Treon said. "What's new in AAMP 3.0 is that the reasoning travels with the proposal. A seller can tell us not just what a package costs, but why they believe it fits the brief - the audience rationale, the formats, the terms behind the price. That context is what our planning models need, and now it arrives in a form they can actually read."

Jonas Jaanimagi, Technology Lead at IAB Australia, described a role that the local IAB network has already begun playing with the reference implementations. "IAB Australia has opened expressions of interest for a seller-side pilot using the AAMP reference implementations available today," Jaanimagi said. "We've been running those implementations in a lab for months and contributing feedback upstream. Our role now is to help Australian publishers test discovery, proposal and approval workflows in a sandbox before any live spend is involved, and to turn that practical experience into useful evidence for the industry."

What is not yet finished

Several elements of AAMP 3.0 remain deliberately incomplete at the point of public comment opening. Machine-readable schemas, which would let software validate a proposal's structure automatically, are not published alongside this first draft. According to the GitHub repository, that absence is intentional: "They are not published with this first draft, because the comment period is still deciding questions that shape them. They will follow the first revision, after the comment period closes on 2026-10-22." Until schemas arrive, the repository points implementers toward its examples folder as the best available reference for how a proposal should be shaped.

The repository also lists seven open questions that IAB Tech Lab says it especially wants answered during the comment window, tracked through individual GitHub issues, though the specific content of those questions is not detailed in the materials reviewed for this article. Commenting does not require IAB Tech Lab membership; the repository states that a GitHub account is the only prerequisite, and it separates the act of commenting from the act of deciding, noting that the working group reviews every comment and decides its disposition according to governance rules published in the repository.

The repository offers a structured menu of comment types depending on what a commenter wants to say: opening a general comment to flag something unclear, wrong or missing; opening a change request or submitting a pull request to propose specific normative wording; commenting on a tracking issue to answer one of the seven open questions; opening an "Implementation feedback" issue to report what happened when someone tried to build against the draft; or using GitHub Discussions to ask a question rather than raise a formal issue.

Why this matters for advertising professionals

For agencies, Edwards' blog post frames the central promise as a reduction in manual reconciliation work: teams could spend less time reconciling documents, spreadsheets, emails and platform data, and more time on strategy, reviewing recommendations and applying judgment. Whether that promise holds in practice depends on adoption, since OpenProposal only creates value once publishers actually describe their inventory in the format. Treon's quote in the press release suggests at least one agency has already begun evaluating what that shift in information quality looks like inside a live planning workflow.

For publishers, the pitch centers on discoverability rather than replacement of existing sales relationships. OpenProposal, according to Edwards' post, creates the opportunity to be considered for more briefs without manually responding to every one, potentially exposing differentiated inventory, audiences and creative ideas to buyers who might otherwise never encounter them. That framing implicitly acknowledges the state of affairs the blog post describes elsewhere: publishers currently have to triage which RFPs they respond to, and inventory outside a buyer's familiar relationships risks going unseen regardless of fit.

For advertisers, the press release frames the benefit as tighter alignment between a media plan and the business objectives behind it, since a broader consideration set means, in principle, that each line item more clearly answers the original brief. Edwards' post puts a qualifier on that promise directly: "Agents can review far more options than a human team ever could, which is what makes them so powerful. But scale alone is not enough." IAB Tech Lab's materials are explicit that scale without a shared structure for describing proposals accomplishes little on its own, which is the gap OpenProposal is designed to close. Whether it closes that gap will not be testable until publishers begin generating proposals in the format and buyer agents begin acting on them, a process the repository's own draft-stability warning suggests has not yet reached a point where production systems should depend on it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: IAB Technology Laboratory, the nonprofit global standards-setting body for digital advertising, announced the release. Anthony Katsur, the organization's chief executive officer, and Barnaby Edwards, Senior Director of Product Marketing, are named authors of the accompanying statements. Industry figures quoted include Michael Palmer of WPP Media, Mike Treon of PMG, and Jonas Jaanimagi of IAB Australia.

What: AAMP 3.0 adds OpenProposal, a specification defining how sellers represent advertising products and respond to buyer requests for proposal in a format software agents can parse and evaluate. The specification defines 71 total fields across 11 headers grouped into four categories, with only 3 fields requiring negotiation between buyer and seller. It connects to existing IAB Tech Lab execution standards, including AdCOM, OpenDirect and the Deals API, without replacing them.

When: IAB Tech Lab announced AAMP 3.0 on September 22, 2026. The specification's public comment period runs from that date through October 22, 2026. Machine-readable schemas are planned to follow the first revision after the comment period closes.

Where: The specification applies globally to the digital advertising supply chain, spanning open web display, connected television, mobile apps, audio, out-of-home, linear television and walled-garden platforms. IAB Australia has separately opened expressions of interest for a seller-side pilot using existing AAMP reference implementations.

Why: The specification addresses a stage of media buying, the interval between a request for proposal and a buy commitment, that has lacked a common technical standard even as adjacent stages such as auctions, deal creation, measurement and delivery are already standardized. Without a shared format, buying agents cannot consistently evaluate proposals from a large number of publishers, and publishers cannot make their inventory legible to agents at scale, a constraint IAB Tech Lab describes as a bandwidth problem rather than a quality problem.