IAB Tech Lab proposes OpenProposal to automate the ad-buying RFP slog

Why it matters

OpenProposal could remove a manual bottleneck from media buying, but its value depends on adoption as overlapping agentic advertising standards compete for buyers and publishers.

IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur (@anthonykatsur) released AAMP 3.0 on September 22nd, adding a proposed standard for the awkward stretch of media buying between an advertiser's brief and the moment someone commits money.

The central addition, OpenProposal, gives publishers a machine-readable format for describing ad products and responding to requests for proposals. Buyer agents can use those responses to discover packages, compare sellers, check whether inventory fits a campaign and negotiate terms. The specification is in public comment through October 22nd while IAB Tech Lab incorporates it into reference software for buyer and seller agents.

Katsur has spent his career inside the systems OpenProposal is meant to connect. Before taking over IAB Tech Lab in 2021, he held engineering, product and management roles at DoubleClick after its acquisition of NetGravity, ran Maxifier as CEO, worked in senior positions at MediaMath and Rubicon Project, led Sonobi and joined Nexstar Media Group as an executive overseeing digital strategy and operations. When IAB Tech Lab appointed him, Katsur described the role as an opportunity to "give back to an industry that has given me so much."

AAMP 3.0 reflects that operator's preference for extending infrastructure already in use. Katsur is asking publishers, agencies and ad-tech platforms to make their existing systems legible to agents rather than rebuild the market around a clean-sheet transaction layer.

The missing handoff

Digital advertising already has detailed standards for auctions, deal creation, measurement and delivery. The RFP remains stubbornly dependent on briefs, media kits, spreadsheets, emails and meetings. That makes it a poor handoff point for agents that can process thousands of products but still need structured descriptions of what each seller is offering.

OpenProposal defines how sellers can publish catalogs of standard packages, reserve other products for custom proposals and answer a buyer's campaign brief. A buyer agent can rank the resulting proposals against declared audience, timing, format and pricing requirements. If the parties proceed, the proposal can flow into IAB Tech Lab's existing AdCOM, OpenDirect and Deals API standards for booking, execution and reporting.

"OpenProposal fills a major gap between a buyer's brief and a buy commitment," Katsur said in the announcement.

The distinction matters because a proposal contains more than inventory and price. Publishers may need to explain why an audience, format or sponsorship suits the campaign. PMG executive Mike Treon said in the announcement that AAMP 3.0 allows that reasoning to travel with the proposal in a form planning models can read.

IAB Tech Lab describes a seven-stage workflow: sellers publish products; buyers discover packages; agents compare options; opportunities are qualified against the media plan; terms are negotiated; approved orders are executed; and performance is reported against the original campaign objectives.

Katsur's continuity bet

The AAMP framework is an open-source collection of protocols, schemas and reference implementations. Its management layer covers agent discovery, campaign requirements, inventory, audiences, negotiation, orders and deals. An agent registry supplies identity and disclosure functions, while a separate real-time framework handles agent services operating inside advertising platforms.

Developers can inspect the AAMP repository hub and download separate buyer-agent and seller-agent implementations. The buyer software is designed to browse seller catalogs, negotiate prices, aggregate inventory across publishers and book programmatic-direct deals through OpenDirect.

AAMP 3.0 also adds controls for the mundane failures that become expensive when software acts quickly. Pricing, packages, orders and buy details are constrained by deterministic rules. Authentication and authorization govern which agents can transact. Idempotency allows an agent to retry an unanswered order request without accidentally placing the order twice.

That focus follows Katsur's background. His IAB Tech Lab biography spans more than 27 years in advertising technology, including companies that built, operated and bought through the infrastructure AAMP now seeks to adapt. His strategy is continuity: agents should use the industry's existing vocabulary and transaction rails, with new software layered over them.

IAB Tech Lab released AAMP 2.3 on July 30th with deployment, privacy and pricing controls aimed at moving agent projects into production. OpenProposal pushes further upstream, into the planning and sales work that happens before an order reaches those systems.

The standards race is already underway

Katsur is pursuing this standard while another open protocol, AdCP, covers overlapping territory. AgenticAdvertising.org describes AdCP as a common language for agents to discover, plan, buy, sell and measure media. Its workflows also include proposals, inventory discovery, negotiation, media-buy creation and reporting.

IAB Tech Lab has acknowledged the overlap. In its comparison of AAMP and AdCP, the organization argues that AAMP extends across campaign planning, seller discovery, negotiation, ordering and execution rather than serving only as an impression-level or auction framework.

The competing approaches create a familiar standards problem. Shared formats reduce integration work only when enough buyers and sellers choose the same formats, or when the rival systems agree on interoperability. A technically complete proposal schema does little for a buying agent if major publishers describe their inventory through another protocol.

The clearest implementation evidence in the AAMP 3.0 announcement comes from IAB Australia, which has been running the reference software in a lab and is seeking participants for a seller-side sandbox pilot. That work will test discovery, proposals and approvals before live spending enters the process.

The public-comment period gives Katsur and IAB Tech Lab one month to turn industry feedback into a specification that agencies, publishers and platforms are willing to implement. OpenProposal solves a recognizable operational problem. Its harder task is persuading the advertising market to solve that problem in the same language.