The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab is moving to standardise how AI agents buy and sell digital advertising, with a new framework.
The industry body has released AAMP 3.0, the latest version of its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols.
In May, a framework was launched by IAB to help advertisers use AI more safely.
At the centre of the update is OpenProposal, a new specification designed to give publishers a standardised, machine-readable way to describe their advertising products and respond to buyer briefs.
The aim is to ultimately make it easier for AI-powered buying systems to discover, compare and assess media opportunities without every buyer and seller having to develop separate ways for their systems to communicate.
For publishers, the framework provides a common format for presenting advertising inventory, packages and proposals. And for agencies and advertisers, it’s intended to make it possible for AI agents to assess a wider pool of media opportunities against a brief and help automate parts of the planning and buying process.
AAMP 3.0 is designed to work alongside existing digital advertising standards, including AdCOM, OpenDirect and the Deals API, rather than replacing the infrastructure already used for digital advertising transactions.
The framework covers the broader media-buying workflow, including product discovery, proposal and comparison, qualification, negotiation, execution and reporting.
The development comes as agencies, brands and publishers increasingly experiment with AI agents that can perform tasks across media planning and buying, raising the need for common standards that allow those systems to interact across different businesses and platforms.
Australia to put AAMP to the test
The development also has a local component, with IAB Australia preparing to run a sandbox pilot of the AAMP standards with Australian publishers from the first week of October.
The pilot will test the framework in a controlled environment, with learnings from Australian publishers fed back into the ongoing development of the global standard.
IAB Australia technology lead Jonas Jaanimagi said the local testing would give Australian publishers an opportunity to influence the standard before wider adoption.
“Testing AAMP Protocols properly now means our publishers can help shape how it works, rather than adopting a standard that’s already locked in,” Jaanimagi said.
The Australian pilot will also examine areas including privacy and governance alongside the commercial application of the technology.
WPP Media global vice president of emerging technologies Michael Palmer said:
“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.”
“Agentic planning gives us the opportunity to evaluate a much broader range of media opportunities and information when we build a plan,” added Mike Treon, head of CTV Strategy at PMG.
“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.”
The OpenProposal specification is open for public comment until 22 October 2026, ahead of its incorporation into buyer and seller agent software development kits.
