IAB gives AI ad-buying agents a shared proposal format, and measurement contracts get a template

IAB Tech Lab published a standard on September 22 that lets AI agents read and respond to advertising proposals in a machine-readable format, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau used the same day to release a template contract for the measurement, verification and attribution services that sit underneath those campaigns.

What changed

AAMP 3.0, the latest version of IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, adds a new specification called OpenProposal. It targets a stage of media buying that standards have never really covered: the gap between an advertiser's RFP and a buy commitment, which has historically run through people manually trading and reading proposals. OpenProposal gives sellers a standard format for describing ad packages and answering a brief, so a buying agent can discover what's available, compare it against the brief, check fit and availability, and negotiate terms before the deal moves into the execution and reporting standards IAB Tech Lab already runs, such as AdCOM, OpenDirect and the Deals API.

The spec stays open for public feedback through October 22, and IAB Tech Lab is folding it into its Buyer and Seller Agent SDK reference implementations while that window runs. It also formalizes idempotency for agent-placed orders, meaning a repeated instruction confirms the original order rather than duplicating it — a guardrail for a process where an AI agent, not a person, is committing budget.

"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." Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab

A template for the contracts behind measurement

Separately, IAB released the Measurement Services Addendum v1.0, a draft standard contract for advertisers, agencies, publishers, platforms and measurement providers to use when they buy, sell or govern services covering ad measurement, verification and the attribution and analytics layer underneath it. It builds on IAB's General Terms v1.1 and Direct Buy Addendum v1.0, both released earlier this year, and is meant to be adopted as written or folded into an existing agreement rather than replacing it outright. It's also open for comment through October 22.

IAB CEO David Cohen framed the problem as one of drift: measurement has gotten more sophisticated while the paperwork behind it hasn't kept up, with every relationship negotiated from scratch. The addendum is IAB's attempt at a shared starting point instead.

It's easy to read these as one announcement, since they landed the same day with overlapping names and the same October 22 deadline. They aren't. IAB Tech Lab is the technical standards body building AAMP and OpenProposal; IAB is the trade association whose Terms & Conditions Task Force wrote the Measurement Services Addendum. Different organizations, different documents, same news cycle.

Who this hits

• Any software company that buys programmatic, video or connected TV media through an agency or DSP now has a spec to ask its agency about: will their agent stack read and write OpenProposal, and is your brand's brief structured enough for an agent to represent it accurately.
• Marketing ops and legal teams who negotiate contracts with attribution, verification or analytics vendors get a template to benchmark against at the next renewal, instead of starting the redline from zero.
• Ad tech vendors and DSPs/SSPs are told explicitly that nothing about existing programmatic infrastructure has to change to support this — OpenProposal sits upstream of execution, not inside it.

What to do about it

Two separate but related moves are worth making before the October 22 comment deadline closes.

• Pull the draft Measurement Services Addendum and run it past whoever handles your analytics or attribution vendor contracts — even a partial adoption at your next renewal could cut the custom-legal-review cycle that these deals usually require.
• Ask your media-buying agency or in-house trading desk whether it plans to implement OpenProposal, and if so, get your own brand safety, pricing and inventory guardrails written into the structured brief it will hand to a buying agent — a poorly specified brief limits what an agent can accurately request on your behalf.
• Track who is piloting this. IAB Australia is already recruiting sellers to test the AAMP reference build in a live run, worth watching if your media runs through publishers in that market or elsewhere in the network.

The upside IAB Tech Lab is pitching is a wider consideration set: in practice, a buying agent can weigh far more publisher pitches than a person would ever get through by hand, which could put options in front of a planner that a fully manual process would never have reached. That's a real possibility for software marketers who currently only get manual attention from the largest publishers. It's also a reason to ask your agency which publishers its agents are actually surfacing once this goes live, rather than treating the plan as a black box because an agent built it.