AAMP vs AdCP: Agentic Advertising Standards Explained 2026

AAMP is IAB Tech Lab's umbrella for extending OpenRTB, OpenDirect, AdCOM and the Deals API so AI agents can trade media on existing rails. AdCP is a separate open protocol, started by Scope3, Yahoo, PubMatic and others, built on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. Both are live specifications. Neither carries meaningful spend yet. Build an abstraction layer and track both.

This tracker records what each camp has published, who has signed up, which versions are current, and what is actually transacting. It is written for engineers who have to decide what to build this quarter and for analysts who need dates they can cite.

AAMP extends what already exists. The Tech Lab's position since October 2025 has been that the industry does not need a second rulebook. Katsur said the Tech Lab had "already solved some of the problems that this AdCP initiative is trying to" and that what the industry does not need is "another industry trade group" (PPC Land, 2 November 2025). The January 2026 roadmap committed to open-source buyer and seller agents, a neutral MCP reference server, standardised agent profiles, and gRPC and Protocol Buffers mappings for existing specifications (IAB Tech Lab, 6 January 2026). The seven protocol components named on 26 February 2026 map one to one onto existing standards: Agentic Audiences (UCP), Agentic Ad Objects (AdCOM), Agentic Direct (OpenDirect), Agentic Deals (Deals API), Agentic Bid (OpenRTB), Agentic Creative and Agentic Mobile (CloudX) (PPC Land, 1 March 2026).

Two pieces matter for infrastructure teams. ARTF is a container model: an exchange or DSP hosts third-party agent services in its own data center and lets them enrich a bid request before the auction, over gRPC with Protocol Buffers (RTBlint guide, accessed 17 October 2026). That is the first IAB Tech Lab specification that assumes code from another company runs inside your bidder. Adform and Adsquare shipped the first public ARTF integration on 27 May 2026, with Adsquare's agents running inside Adform's DSP for on-premise bid-request enrichment and no off-platform data sharing (ExchangeWire, 27 May 2026). The second piece is OpenProposal in AAMP 3.0, which defines how a seller represents ad products and answers a buyer's brief in agent-readable form, across a lifecycle of Publish, Discover, Compare, Qualify, Negotiate, Bind and Execute, and Report, using AdCOM as the shared vocabulary (IAB Tech Lab, 22 September 2026). Existing programmatic implementations are explicitly allowed to keep operating unchanged.

AdCP starts from the agent, not the auction. AdCP defines tasks (create_media_buy, get_media_buy_delivery, build_creative, sync_creatives, activate_signal and others) that an agent calls over MCP or A2A (PPC Land, 16 October 2025). Version 3.0 added brand.json at a well-known URL so a brand can declare its identity and authorized operators, adagents.json for seller discovery, 20 planning channels, proposals with budget allocations and forecasts, and a signed governance_context token for plan-level policy, which is still experimental (AdCP, What's new in 3.0). Version 3.2 added cross-package frequency caps, seller-optimized shared budgets and Reliable Reporting 1.0 (AdCP release notes). The protocol does not touch the bid request. When an AdCP buy executes, it lands on whatever the seller already runs: a programmatic guaranteed deal, a private marketplace deal ID, or a direct order. For how those execution rails work, see RTB architecture explained and the glossary entry for deal ID.

The overlap is the problem. Schlosser's description is the clearest public statement from a platform that has implemented both: AdCP "has the same functionality as AAMP," and Adform plans a core layer that takes one brief and routes it to whichever protocol a seller uses (ExchangeWire TraderTalk, 23 September 2026). His estimate of the cost of not having a shared standard is specific: a custom deals API integration with one SSP takes 250 to 350 days of work against perhaps 50 on a shared standard (PPC Land, 24 September 2026).

The honest answer on 17 October 2026 is: pilots, proofs of concept and a few million dollars.

The most direct statement comes from Adform. In an ExchangeWire interview published on 23 September 2026, Jochen Schlosser, Adform's CTO and CPO, said that AAMP and AdCP largely do the same job, that platforms will translate between them, and that buyers "need not care too much which protocol is used" (ExchangeWire TraderTalk, 23 September 2026). PPC Land's write-up of the same interview, headlined "Neither of ad tech's two AI agent protocols runs at scale, Adform CTO says," records that when asked whether very little money runs through both systems, he replied "Absolutely," and that in his view "either one will die or they will be merged or they will coexist" (PPC Land, 24 September 2026). Adform reported 2025 revenue of EUR 103.4 million, 81.9% from buy-side fees, so this is a platform with money at stake in the answer (PPC Land, 24 September 2026).

The spend figures that exist are small. Apostra, the renamed Scope3, is the company most committed to AdCP. PPC Land reported, citing Business Insider, that an unnamed major brand started a $1 million US campaign through its platform in April 2026, and, citing Adweek, that cumulative agentic buys stood at roughly $1.2 million; the company has 40 media partners and about 40 staff after two rounds of layoffs from more than 100 (PPC Land, 27 September 2026). The same article records Magnite's most optimistic forecast for 2027 agentic spend at $600 million to $700 million, which would still be a rounding error against programmatic. On the AAMP side there is no public spend figure at all. The Agent Registry went from 10 entries on 11 March 2026 to 49 on 17 October 2026, all of the early ones MCP servers rather than A2A agents (PPC Land, 11 March 2026; registry, accessed 17 October 2026). PMG and Kochava have shipped AAMP buyer-agent integrations (IAB Tech Lab, 7 April 2026; GlobeNewswire via Yahoo Finance, 24 March 2026). IAB Australia says it has run AAMP 3.0 implementations "in a lab for months" and has opened a seller-side pilot (IAB Tech Lab, 22 September 2026). None of these announcements carries a dollar figure.

What is in production is MCP. Adform exposes more than 800 capabilities of its DSP, ad server and DMP through an MCP server that Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot can call (ExchangeWire, 13 May 2026). NBCUniversal, FreeWheel, RPA and Newton Research ran an MCP-based agent-to-agent buy for a Q1 2026 premium video campaign, including live football playoffs, without naming either AdCP or AAMP (Newton Research, 6 January 2026). The pattern is consistent: companies are wrapping existing APIs in MCP and running supervised pilots. The two advertising-specific protocols sit above that layer and have not yet proven they are needed for the money to move.

1. Separate the agent layer from the execution layer. Both protocols hand off to deal IDs, programmatic guaranteed and direct orders. If your exchange, DSP or ad server already supports OpenRTB 2.6 deals and the Deals API, you have the execution side covered for both camps. The private ad exchange setup guide covers the deal plumbing.
2. Build one internal brief object and two adapters. Schlosser's "core layer" is the right design: one canonical representation of a brief, package, price and report, with thin connectors to AdCP tasks and AAMP SDK calls. His estimate is that connecting a second standard "will cost almost nothing" once the first exists (PPC Land, 24 September 2026).
3. Treat ARTF as a security decision, not a feature. ARTF runs someone else's container inside your bidder and lets it rewrite requests. Decide now what you will allow: read-only enrichment, mutation of specific fields, or nothing. Validate the request after every stage that can change it and log the diff (RTBlint guide). The latency and QPS consequences belong in your capacity plan; see QPS, latency and bid performance.
4. Publish discovery files only when you can honor them. adagents.json and brand.json (AdCP) and a registry entry tied to your GPP ID (AAMP) are public commitments. An agent that discovers you will try to transact.
5. Keep humans on every price-moving path. AAMP 2.3 added human approvals for spend outside value thresholds (IAB Tech Lab, 30 July 2026). AdCP's campaign governance is still experimental (AdCP, What's new in 3.0). Your own guardrails are the ones that count.
6. Pin versions and watch the deprecation clock. AdCP negotiates wire versions at release precision ("3.1", "3.2"), dropped 2.x on 1 August 2026, and targets 4.0 for early 2027 (AdCP versions page). A 3.1.3 release was withdrawn (AdCP release notes). AAMP 3.0 closes comment on 22 October 2026.
7. Keep first-party data where it is. Agents negotiate on signals. Audience and outcome signals should reach them through a clean room or an on-premise enrichment step, not through a prompt. See Clean room architectures compared and, for auditability of automated bidding, Explainable AI in RTB.

Adoption claims for both protocols come from their sponsors. Our own practitioner survey, State of AI in Programmatic 2027, is pre-registered with its questionnaire and sample plan and will report in April 2027 how many buyers and sellers actually transact through an agent protocol; its questions on AAMP and AdCP are listed on that page.

What is agentic advertising? It is media planning, buying, selling and measurement carried out by software agents acting on a human brief and talking to other agents through a published protocol. IAB Tech Lab's AAMP and AgenticAdvertising.org's AdCP are the two protocol families. Both were launched between October 2025 and February 2026 and both are on their third major version as of October 2026 (PPC Land, 16 October 2025; PPC Land, 1 March 2026). Our agentic advertising hub collects the related pages.

Is AdCP part of the IAB Tech Lab? No. AdCP is governed by AgenticAdvertising.org, which describes itself as a pending 501(c)(6) trade association (GitHub, accessed 17 October 2026). IAB Tech Lab's CEO said in October 2025 that the industry did not need "another industry trade group" and left AdCP out of the January 2026 roadmap (PPC Land, 2 November 2025; The Current, 6 January 2026). The Prebid community maintains AdCP's reference sell-side implementation, so the two worlds already touch at the code level.

Does AAMP replace OpenRTB? No. AAMP wraps OpenRTB, OpenDirect, AdCOM and the Deals API in MCP, A2A and gRPC and adds ARTF for in-auction enrichment (IAB Tech Lab, 6 January 2026). OpenRTB itself continues on dated snapshots; the latest is 2.6-202606 of 11 June 2026 (openrtb2.x releases). There is no OpenRTB 2.7 and the 3.0 specification remains separate. See the glossary entry for OpenRTB and the RTB architecture hub.

Which companies support AdCP and AAMP? AdCP's founders are PubMatic, Scope3 (now Apostra), Swivel, Triton Digital, Optable and Yahoo, with Magnite, Kargo, LG Ad Solutions and Samba TV among launch supporters and 154+ members claimed today (PPC Land, 16 October 2025; AgenticAdvertising.org). AAMP's ARTF working group includes Amazon Ads, Index Exchange, OpenX, The Trade Desk, Netflix, Yahoo, Paramount, Optable, HUMAN Security, Magnite, PubMatic, WPP Media and Basis (PPC Land, 1 March 2026). PubMatic, Yahoo, Optable and Magnite appear on both lists.

How much ad spend runs through agentic protocols today? Very little, by the account of the people running it. Apostra's agentic buys were reported at about $1.2 million in September 2026 (PPC Land, 27 September 2026). Adform's CTO answered "Absolutely" when asked whether very little money runs through both protocols (PPC Land, 24 September 2026). No AAMP spend figure has been published.

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• 18 October 2026: aligned the title and heading and applied recorded source-URL corrections where needed. Factual research cutoff remains 17 October 2026.

• 17 October 2026. First edition. 34 sources, 36 timeline rows, registry count 49. Next review 17 November 2026.