How to Start Your First Agentic Advertising Campaign (IAB Canada)

AI agents can now read a brief, find inventory and set up a campaign. Planners still set the strategy and approve what goes live. IAB Canada has published two starter guides for media planners, built on IAB Tech Lab’s agentic advertising framework. They cover how the framework works and how to run your first supervised test with as little as 5-10 percent of one campaign's budget. 

Agentic advertising introduces new ways to plan, buy and manage digital media. AI agents may be able to interpret campaign briefs, identify inventory, compare opportunities and prepare transactions. Media planners still set the strategy, establish the boundaries and approve what goes live. To make IAB Tech Lab’s agentic advertising framework easier to understand, IAB Canada has developed two new infographics. The first explains the underlying framework, while the second applies it to a sample campaign.

The first infographic Agentic Advertising 101: A Starter Guide for Media Planners introduces the Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP). AAMP gives buyer agents, seller agents and ad platforms a common way to communicate and complete tasks, using the standards and taxonomies the industry already relies on. Expect these capabilities to show up inside the DSPs, SSPs and platforms teams already use.

The second infographic Your First Agentic AI Campaign: A Starter Guide for Media Planners walks through a sample workflow for a controlled test.

The process begins by identifying where the agent is available and determining which tools and information it can access. The media planner then establishes clear guardrails covering the budget, market, audience, channels, brand safety, privacy and approval requirements. 

A detailed campaign brief gives the agent its assignment. It should include the business goal, budget, target audience, key performance indicator and any limits on what the agent can do. Based on those instructions, the agent may compare inventory, recommend audiences, suggest budget allocations or prepare a campaign setup for review. 

IAB Canada suggests putting 5-10 percent of one campaign's budget into a supervised test, then comparing it with your usual process on performance, setup efficiency, time saved and confidence in the recommendations.

Before activation, the media team should confirm that the agent’s recommendations align with the brief and budget. Planners should also review the proposed inventory and audiences, verify privacy and brand-safety requirements, and ensure the measurement plan is in place. 

Human oversight continues once the campaign is live. Teams remain responsible for monitoring delivery, pacing, performance, inventory quality and any changes recommended by the agent. 

These two infographics provide an accessible introduction to agentic advertising and a starting point for testing it.  

Check out IAB Canada’s Agentic and AI Resource Centre for more information.

Thank you to the team at IAB Canada for their permission to share this resource with IAB New Zealand 🍁