By Anthony Katsur, CEO at IAB TechLab.
Last November, the IAB Tech Lab announced the Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF), which defines how agents execute within systems. We also announced, through a generous donation by LiveRamp, the Agentic Audiences Framework (fka User Context Protocol). And this January, we announced our Agentic Advertising Initiative and have since released multiple technical specifications and open-source frameworks, including our Buyer and Seller Agent SDKs, built on existing Tech Lab standards such as AdCOM and OpenDirect. We also received another fine donation from CloudX supporting agentic workflows in the mobile app ecosystem.
Since then, we have observed some confusion in the market conflating ARTF and Agentic Audiences as the entirety of our agentic work. That is not accurate.
This post is intended to clear the air.
Whether it is ARTF, Agentic Audiences, or our Buyer and Seller Agent SDK’s these are components of a broader and more comprehensive initiative.
That initiative has a name: Agentic Ad Management Protocols, or AAMP, for short. You can thank us later for introducing a new four-letter acronym to the industry.
We shared a sneak preview of AAMP at our latest Agentic Bootcamp and fully unveiled it at this week’s Beet.TV Beet Retreat.
AAMP is the umbrella initiative under which all this work is developed in partnership with the advertising ecosystem.
AAMP is built on three pillars.
The first pillar is a high-performance delivery and execution control plane upon which agents can communicate:
This is where ARTF lives. ARTF defines how agent services can safely and deterministically operate within advertising systems, including real-time bidding environments, cutting latency by 90% and upleveling agentic real-time decisioning for quality and trust. It is about execution. It is about performance. It is about making outputs of agentic systems viable in production via the MCP interface built into the specification. It is foundational work.
The second is Agentic Protocols:
This provides schemas, tools, and open-source reference implementations for integrating Agentic AI technology into agencies, brands, publishers, and adtech provider systems.
This is the management layer. It defines how buyer and seller agents understand each other, discover, negotiate, transact orders and deals, exchange audience signals, and complete laborious and cumbersome setup tasks required before execution. This includes work like Agentic Direct, Agentic Audiences, Agentic Mobile, and Agentic Ad Objects (derived from the Advertising Common Object Model), along with buyer and seller reference agents.
The third is trust: the Agent Registry
This pillar provides agent-neutral transparency and accountability across the ecosystem. It establishes a trusted framework for agent identity, verification, and disclosure so participants can confidently understand who (or what) they are transacting with. The Tech Lab Agent Registry is launching next week!
These three pillars are deliberately complementary.
Certain agentic tasks do not scale without a high-performance execution infrastructure.
Execution infrastructure is meaningless without shared standards.
And the ecosystem needs a neutral party providing agent transparency.
All are required if you want agentic systems that operate at scale without ambiguity, hallucination, or erosion of trust.
Most importantly, AAMP doesn’t require reinvention.
Advertising already has deeply defined object models, taxonomies, and transaction semantics.
AAMP builds on that foundation so agents can act with repeatable accuracy instead of probabilistic guesswork.
ARTF is an early, concrete milestone on the AAMP roadmap. Agentic Protocols are evolving with real-world usage. The Agent Registry will ensure trust and transparency as adoption scales. There is more to come from an agentic perspective, including powering non-digital channels such as linear television, radio, and out-of-home. We’re working on that in the Tech Lab right now.
If you are serious about agentic advertising or just want to learn (we're all still figuring this out together), we encourage you to join the Agentic Task Force and any one of our sub-task forces focused on buyers, sellers, and audiences to help us deliver the AAMP framework for a thriving agentic ecosystem.
Join us: https://iabtechlab.com/standards/aamp-agentic-advertising-management-protocols/
