IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standards-setting body, announced AAMP 3.0, the next major release of its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols framework, introducing a standardized way for buyers and sellers to move from an RFP through proposal evaluation and toward a buy commitment in agentic advertising.
OpenProposal brings a common standard to a historically manual stage of media buying, connecting RFPs to buy commitments and will be in public comment until October 22, 2026.
While standards exist for many stages of digital media buying and execution, the process between an RFP and a buy commitment has historically been handled largely through human and manual workflows. As AI agents take on more responsibility for discovering, evaluating and planning media, that gap creates the need for a common way for buyer and seller agents to exchange and evaluate proposals before a transaction moves toward execution.
AAMP 3.0 addresses that gap through OpenProposal, a new specification that defines how sellers can represent advertising products and respond to buyer briefs in a standardized, agent-readable format. OpenProposal enables buying agents to discover and compare opportunities against a brief while giving sellers control over how their inventory and ad products are represented.
"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," said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. "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."
OpenProposal creates a standard way for publishers to define advertising products and packages and to represent them in RFP responses. Buying agents can evaluate those proposals against a buyer's brief, compare opportunities and assess suitability before moving toward a buy commitment. Once an opportunity moves forward, AAMP connects that proposal to the standards and infrastructure used for all types of transaction and execution.
AAMP 3.0 supports a media lifecycle that includes Publish where sellers publish a catalog of public packages, Discover where buyer agents retrieve packages, Compare where agents evaluate and rank against brief, Qualify for audience and flight fit, Negotiate for custom terms, Bind & Execute using existing standards, and Report where performance flows back through reporting standards. AdCOM provides a common vocabulary throughout these stages.
OpenProposal gives publishers a standardized way to make a broader range of ad products understandable to buying agents. In the proposal, sellers can include information necessary for buyers to understand how the products can be bought, executed, measured and evaluated. It complements OpenDirect, AdCOM, and the Deals API, using those established standards as opportunities move from planning into transaction. Existing programmatic implementations can continue operating without requiring DSPs, SSPs or other technologies to change.
The AAMP agent SDKs continue to harden deterministic guardrails governing pricing, ad packages, orders and media buy details, increase trust in agent identities, and strengthen idempotency. In practical terms, idempotency means an instruction can be sent twice without happening twice.
"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." added Michael Palmer, Global Vice President, Emerging Technologies at WPP Media.
"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."
"IAB Australia has opened expressions of interest for a seller-side pilot using the AAMP reference implementations available today," said Jonas Jaanimagi, Technology Lead, IAB Australia. "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."
To review the OpenProposal specification, supporting technical resources, and to provide feedback via Public Comment until October 22, 2026, visit iabtechlab.com/AAMPv3.
About IAB Technology Laboratory
Established in 2014, the IAB Technology Laboratory is a non-profit consortium that engages a member community globally to develop foundational technology and standards that enable growth and trust in the digital media ecosystem. Its work includes the OpenRTB real-time bidding protocol, ads.txt anti-fraud specification, Open Measurement SDK, VAST video specification, Trusted Server, and the Agentic Roadmap initiative for agentic advertising.
