Two efforts are racing to standardize agentic advertising at the same time. A publisher reading the trade press could be forgiven for thinking they have to pick a side. They mostly do not. Here is what each one is.
AdCP: the open protocol
AdCP (Ad Context Protocol) is an open standard that gives the general agent protocols an advertising vocabulary. It is task-first: it defines named tasks like discovering products, creating a media buy, and syncing creatives, each with an agreed JSON shape, so any buyer agent and any sales agent can interoperate without a custom adapter for each pair. AdCP runs over MCP and A2A. It has founding backers across the sell side and a public reference implementation, which Bidcliq maintains for Prebid.org.
Note
AdCP organizes its work into three modules you will meet in Track H: a Media Buy protocol, a Creative protocol, and a Signals Activation protocol.
AAMP: the IAB Tech Lab roadmap
The IAB Tech Lab is the standards body behind ads.txt, sellers.json, OpenRTB, and GPP. Its agentic work is gathered under AAMP (Agentic Advertising Management Protocols). Rather than one protocol, AAMP is a roadmap with several parts: buyer and seller agent SDKs, an agent registry, and execution frameworks. Two of its pieces are worth naming now, because Track I covers them: ARTF, which runs agents close to the inventory to cut latency, and Agentic Audiences, which moves audience signals between agents at machine speed.
| AdCP | IAB Tech Lab AAMP | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An open protocol (a task vocabulary) | A standards-body roadmap of SDKs, a registry, and frameworks |
| Runs over | MCP and A2A | MCP, A2A, and gRPC |
| Backed by | Sell-side founders plus a Prebid.org reference implementation | IAB Tech Lab membership |
| Track here | Track H | Track I |
Key idea
Neither effort throws out what you already know. Both sit on top of ads.txt, sellers.json, and OpenRTB. Agentic advertising is a new way to operate the existing supply chain, not a replacement for it.
Quick check
A publisher asks whether adopting an agentic sales agent means abandoning their Prebid and ads.txt setup. What do you tell them?
Note
The two efforts overlap and there is real industry debate about how they fit together. For a publisher the practical answer is the same either way: keep your supply chain clean and your inventory well described, because both approaches read it.