Concepts and standards
AdCP, the Ad Context Protocol from AgenticAdvertising.org, and AAMP, IAB Tech Lab's umbrella label, are the two protocol families of agentic advertising. Both run over general-purpose agent transports — MCP and A2A — and AAMP adds REST over OpenDirect 2.1.
Eight words appear in both vocabularies, and only Product and Account mean the same thing in each. Agentic advertising and agentic buying are the names for the category itself, and no specification in either corpus defines agentic advertising, although one protocol family is named after it.
- AAMP AAMP is IAB Tech Lab's umbrella label for nine separately versioned agentic advertising repositories
- Ad Context Protocol AdCP (Ad Context Protocol) is an open advertising standard from AgenticAdvertising.org whose stable 3.1.13 release registers 64 operations across ten schema groups
- AdCP to AAMP terminology map The AdCP to AAMP terminology map pairs the vocabularies of the two agentic advertising standards term by term, showing which words translate between them.
- Agentic Advertising Agentic advertising is the category name for advertising planned, bought and sold by AI agents acting for a buyer and a seller
- Agentic Buying Agentic buying is media procurement performed by software agents
- MCP and A2A MCP and A2A are general-purpose agent transports with no advertising semantics
- OpenDirect 2.1 OpenDirect 2.1 is IAB Tech Lab's REST standard for booking guaranteed ad inventory
- Sponsored Intelligence Sponsored Intelligence (SI) is AdCP's name for advertising on AI surfaces
Other sections
- Ad Tech Glossary — all 35 terms, A to Z
- 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.
- About — Which specification each definition comes from, and the terms this glossary leaves out on purpose.