IAB launches standards for AI media buying and ad measurement contracts
The IAB Tech Lab is pushing two pieces of digital advertising infrastructure toward standardization: one for AI agents buying media, and another for the contracts behind advertising measurement.
What’s Being Standardized
The first release is OpenProposal, a specification designed to standardize the part of media buying that sits between an advertiser’s brief and a commitment to buy. That process has historically relied on people exchanging and evaluating proposals by hand. OpenProposal aims to make that step machine readable so AI agents can handle it.
The second piece targets measurement contracts, structuring how companies define and agree on the terms behind advertising measurement deals.
The Operator Implication
If you run paid media for a product or agency, the direction here is clear: the middle layer of media buying, the back and forth between brief and signed order, is being built for agent automation. Standards like OpenProposal are what make that interoperable across platforms rather than siloed inside one vendor’s tooling.
These are early stage frameworks, not shipping products. But IAB standards tend to become table stakes for ad tech vendors within a few product cycles.
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