Agentic Ad Lab

Commit this year's engineering time to AdCP. The Ad Context Protocol is 64 operations at one release, 3.1.13, in one registry you can freeze, diff and re-test next quarter: discover inventory, book it, send creative, check the rules. AAMP, IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, is 8 repositories across 3 planes — one for planning and booking, one for mutating a bid request mid-auction, one for exchanging audience embeddings — that tag on their own schedules and share no data type. That is a reasonable way to ship a large standard fast. It is not a way to write a contract clause, and the clause is what your procurement team will ask you for.

Anthony Katsur's own umbrella is 8 repositories of standards proliferation. He runs IAB Tech Lab and he calls proliferation a real cost to the industry; he is right about the cost, and the buyer pays it rather than either standards body. The acknowledgement runs one way: AdCP's FAQ names AAMP, and no AAMP repository mentions AdCP. Silence across 8 repositories is a decision somebody made.

That FAQ draws the line as "AAMP is agentic bidding; AdCP is agentic buying" and concludes that the two compose. The transports do compose. The object models do not, and AAMP's own seller agent is the proof: its OpenAPI document publishes proposals, a negotiation sub-resource, deals and an order lifecycle under /api/v1, which is the campaign layer AdCP claims for itself. AdCP calls that role the sales agent, AAMP calls it the seller agent, and shipping one gets you no closer to shipping the other. The two have never had to interoperate, so I don't buy it.

Money has already moved, some of it through AdCP and some through raw MCP with no buy-side spec involved at all. Butler/Till and PubMatic bought CTV for a beverage brand from a natural-language brief across two flights from December 2025, NBCUniversal and RPA transacted NFL playoff inventory agent to agent over MCP, Boostr's seller agent closed a campaign-level buy at Vox Media, and Omnicom told investors in April that live client buys are running on agent-to-agent infrastructure. I keep a dated ledger of who has actually transacted, with the vendor claims marked as vendor claims, because almost every number published so far came from the company that sold the campaign.

What has not arrived is scale, and the arithmetic there is brutal. Michael Barrett, Magnite's chief executive, collected the most optimistic 2027 forecasts anyone would give him at Cannes and they put the entire agentic market at 600 to 700 million dollars; Magnite by itself processes roughly 9 billion dollars of ad spend a year. The whole market next year is four weeks of one company's pipe.

Prototype against AdCP now, while being wrong costs a sprint rather than a renewal. Put the integration into the contracts you sign for next year rather than the budget you defend this one. Keep AAMP off the roadmap until an advertiser's money goes through it, and re-open the question the week IAB Tech Lab publishes a normative document for its buyer/seller control plane.

What a buyer can pin

The order the questions arrive in

Which stack, how much autonomy, which vendor, and what any of it does to your team. The comparison settles the first one and is the page to read if you read nothing else. The rest are below in the order the questions actually arrive.

• AdCP vs AAMP
  Where the two overlap, where they genuinely don't, and the AGPL-3.0 licence on AAMP's real-time layer that your lawyers should see before you host anything built on it.
• Who is actually running agentic buys
  Every named deployment since December 2025, dated and sourced, with vendor claims separated from the two numbers anyone outside the trade has measured.
• The autonomy ladder
  The rungs between read-only reporting and unattended spend, each mapped to the protocol field that enforces it. Pick the rung you want before a vendor picks it for you.
• Questions to ask an agentic vendor
  Each one paired with the answer that should end the meeting, and the checks you can run on a vendor's endpoint yourself.
• Will agents replace media buyers?
  Role by role, against what the schemas actually automate. Traffickers and planners get different answers.
• How a machine buys media
  One CTV campaign is traced call by call and payload by payload. Start here if you have never watched a buy complete without a person in it.
• What these protocols don't standardize
  Five gaps you inherit, measurement and invalid traffic and disputed delivery among them, plus four published statements that disagree with the repository they describe. Read it before you scope an integration, and again before you sign one.
• What version each standard is on, what IAB Tech Lab has published, the discovery files, and every agent in the public AdCP registry, probed
  These are the reference pages, for the tab you keep open while writing code.

Protocol integration work

I also do this for money, which is the reason the reading above is free. AdCP and AAMP implementation reviews, agent readiness audits before you point a partner at your endpoint, adagents.json and brand.json validation, and buyer or seller agent builds. Every SDK on either side stops before your pricing, your inventory and your creative review policy, and that half is the one you pay for. What that covers, and how it's scoped.

The reading and the audits are mine. Builds are delivered by Postindustria, where I am CEO, so an engagement that needs a team has one behind it.