The dawn of the agentic advertising era has led to a land grab, with industry practitioners now facing an increasingly fragmented marketplace of technical standards and interfaces.
And with headcounts across the board facing cutback after cutback, meaning they have to do more with less, it’s enough to prompt campaign management teams to consider a career pivot.
It is within this context that IAB Tech Lab has launched its agentic roadmap, an initiative that has yielded (yet another) acronym: Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, or AAMP.
The roadmap was unveiled more recently and announced a collaboration with Kochava, integrating its AAMP Buyer Agent SDK into the StationOne platform as an open-source workspace.
The move is aimed at accelerating industry adoption of standardized AI-driven processes for media buying, measurement and compliance, with the “workspace” now available within the vendor’s StationOne platform.
The initiative reflects the Tech Lab’s broader effort to translate emerging specifications into usable tools, with Tech Lab members now able to work within StationOne to test and implement AAMP-based workflows, per the involved parties.
“AAMP is built to support AI-driven workflows on open, trusted standards. Making this workspace open-source within StationOne opens the door for broader industry participation and continued development,” said Anthony Katsur, IAB Tech Lab CEO.
The partnership also marks Kochava taking StationOne out of beta, with company CEO Charles Manning telling Digiday that the platform serves as a desktop-based “orchestration layer” that users can employ to connect AI models and ad tech tools via a set of API keys and Model Context Protocol integrations.
“What you’re looking at here is StationOne, and what it is, is what we’re classifying as an integrative AI hub… a fully downloadable app that brings together various different tools with various different skills across various different AI models,” Manning said.
StationOne includes tools for campaign execution, measurement and compliance, as well as support for evolving privacy requirements and open data standards — areas the Tech Lab has increasingly prioritized as AI adoption accelerates.
The move comes as standards bodies and vendors compete to define how agentic AI will be implemented across the advertising ecosystem, with growing pressure to ensure interoperability before fragmented approaches take hold.
In practical terms, StationOne is a “Slack-like desktop interface” that lets users plug in their own model APIs, connect them via MCP, with Manning telling Digiday it can orchestrate workflows across demand-side platforms, data tools and other tools.
“We’re talking to agencies about how this can help augment their agentic strategy,” Manning said, adding that it can help bring consistency for campaign teams faced with using multiple platforms, which often have disparate workflows, on behalf of clients.
In the early phase of the agentic advertising era, the industry has focused on foundation models, although with the rapid development of such technologies, i.e., fragmentation, attention is turning to technologies that can connect these models to actual media buying.
The subtext is harder to ignore. Multiple competing approaches to agentic advertising are already emerging — from AdCP to vendor-led frameworks — each with its own logic and taxonomy. Without convergence, the risk is a replay of earlier interoperability issues, this time compounded by LLM-driven workflows.
What we’ve heard
“You only make JBPs, or upfront commitments, for the things you know you were going to do anyway.”
— An anonymous industry insider goes some way to explaining the psychology behind joint business plans in the media business.
Numbers to know
Insights from Funnel’s 2025 Marketing Intelligence Report.
- 55%: The percentage of media buyers who claim they have plenty of data, but can’t turn it into actionable insights
- 47%: The percentage of in-house marketers who claim it’s difficult to keep up to date with developments related to AI.
What we’ve covered
Butler/Till’s first agentic media buying tests cut media and supply chain costs
The experimental run successfully cut intermediary fees by over 80% and reduced CPMs while hitting industry benchmarks on fraud and inventory standards, according to the agency and its test partner PubMatic.
Publicis vs. The Trade Desk isn’t really about transparency – it’s about who gets the margin
Away from the pearl-clutching social media posts, operators with insights into the sector argue that the real narrative at play is one centered on margin, control and who ultimately captures the most value from a dollar of media spend.
What we’re reading
FBI is buying data that can be used to track people, Patel says
This is the first confirmation that the FBI has resumed actively buying people’s data for investigations.
LinkedIn is making a big play for streaming TV ad dollars
Advertisers can now target actual business decision-makers – CMOs, CIOs, procurement heads – on the biggest screen in the ouse, using LinkedIn data inside a programmatic TV buy.
DeepIntent launches Helix, a healthcare marketing cloud
The DSP’s latest launch is geared towards addressing the fragmentation in the healthcare marketing ecosystem, where marketers have the dual challenge of engaging with both medical professionals as well as patients.
Smartly signs letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL
The intended fee has yet to be publicly disclosed, with the announcement signaling a flurry of deals in the sector, coming just weeks after Infillion agreed to buy Catalina.