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IAB Tech Lab's OpenProposal makes ad inventory legible to buying agents

AAMP 3.0 opens for public comment through October 22, standardizing the RFP-to-buy handoff for agent-mediated media planning.

By Iris Holloway·Tools & frameworks·

IAB Tech Lab released AAMP 3.0 on September 22, adding an OpenProposal specification that turns the RFP-to-buy handoff into something two software agents can complete without a human broker in the middle. Public comment runs through October 22, 2026, and the practical stakes for anyone who buys or sells media are already legible: inventory that isn’t structured for agent parsing is inventory that agentic planners won’t see.

The specification defines a seven-stage lifecycle, publish, discover, compare, qualify, negotiate, bind and execute, and report, and ships with a Buyer and Seller Agent SDK as reference implementations. It sits alongside AdCOM, OpenDirect, and the Deals API, and follows AAMP 2.3, released July 30 with deployment, privacy, and pricing controls. Idempotency is built in, so an agent retrying an unanswered request gets confirmation of the original order rather than a duplicate buy.

“OpenProposal fills a major gap between a buyer’s brief and a buy commitment,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. PMG’s Mike Treon, Head of CTV Strategy, framed the design intent more plainly: “the reasoning travels with the proposal,” meaning agents exchange “not just what a package costs, but why they believe it fits the brief — the audience rationale, the formats, the terms behind the price.” Michael Palmer, Global VP of Emerging Technologies at WPP Media, called it “a transaction-ready framework” that pushes the industry “from proof-of-concept tests towards the wide-spread use of AI Agents in media transactions.”

None of this is theoretical. Jonas Jaanimagi, Technology Lead at IAB Australia, said his team has been running the reference implementations in a lab “for months” and has opened expressions of interest for a seller-side sandbox pilot before any live spend. The IAB parent body also released a Measurement Services Addendum v1.0, a contractual layer for verification and attribution in agentic buys.

There’s competition. RuntimeWire notes the AdCP protocol covers overlapping ground, and that adoption, not schema completeness, will decide which standard wins. That’s usually how these things end. See also our earlier coverage of Google’s AI Max migration in small-business search ads and paid ads inside ChatGPT answers quadrupling in three months.

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