Ad Tech Glossary

Ad Tech Glossary

The Ad Tech Glossary defines 35 terms from the two agentic advertising protocol stacks — AdCP, from AgenticAdvertising.org, and AAMP, from IAB Tech Lab — and gives each term its counterpart in the other stack, or records that it has none.

AdCP, the Ad Context Protocol, is a registry of named operations and JSON schemas for buying and selling media through agents, published by AgenticAdvertising.org. AAMP is IAB Tech Lab's umbrella over its agentic work — nine repositories, eight of them with published code — covering the same ground plus real-time bidding and audience embeddings. Each stack names a buy-side agent and a sell-side agent, and one word can name different objects in each. The entries for AdCP, AAMP and Package carry the distinctions the rest of the glossary refers back to.

Concepts and standards

The protocols themselves, the transports they run on, and the names the category is given.

Agent roles, identity and discovery

The parties to an agentic trade, the identity each one publishes, and the directories that list them.

Buying objects and campaign lifecycle

A bought campaign breaks into a media buy, its packages and the products behind them.

Signals, audiences and identity

Targeting data, who owns it, and the call that makes it usable on a destination.

Real-time execution and bidstream agents

These terms run at serve time, while an impression is being decided.

Deals, pricing and negotiation

How a price is agreed and booked: quotes, deals, negotiation rounds, access tiers and trust status.

Governance, privacy and compliance

The constraints a buy has to satisfy before it is allowed to run.

Frequently asked

What does AAMP stand for?
IAB Tech Lab's hub README expands AAMP as Agentic Advertising Management Protocols. Repositories under the same label use other expansions of the same acronym for the same set of repositories, among them Agentic Advertising Marketplace Protocol in shipped source.
Do AdCP and AAMP use the same words for the same things?
The two stacks do not share a vocabulary. AdCP says sales agent and AAMP says seller agent for the same role, so the names alone do not reveal that it is one role. Package is the harder case, because both stacks use it: in AdCP a package is a line item inside a media buy that already exists, and in AAMP it is a bundle a seller advertises in a media kit before anything has been bought.

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