The way digital advertising is traded is changing again. Agentic ad buying and selling uses AI agents to handle the work that today sits across inboxes, spreadsheets and RFP portals. On the buy side, an agent takes a brief from an advertiser or agency, finds suitable sellers, compares what they offer and commits budget. On the sell side, a seller agent answers that brief: it reads the request against the publisher's available inventory and returns packages with pricing, delivery forecasts and creative requirements in a format the buyer's agent can understand. Importantly, this happens before the auction, not inside it. It is the planning, proposal and negotiation layer of the deal, now running at machine speed, with the deal itself still landing in the ad server and SSP systems publishers already use.

So why would a publisher want a seller agent? Put simply, because buyers are starting to use agents, and inventory that agents can't see or understand won't make the shortlist. A seller agent turns a static media kit into a live storefront that responds to each buyer's brief, explains why a package fits (audience, context, formats, terms) and can negotiate within price floors and rules the publisher sets. For small and mid-sized publishers in particular, this is a chance to compete for direct and curated spend without needing a large sales team on every brief, and to present first-party audience and contextual signals in a way machines can read. Done right, it could help level the playing field: when a buyer's agent is matching a brief, what should count is whether your audience and inventory fit, not the size of your sales team or how many agency lunches you can host. The guardrails matter just as much as the upside: publishers stay in control of pricing, approvals and which buyers they deal with.

This is where the IAB comes in. Earlier this year IAB Tech Lab brought its agentic work together under the Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, or AAMP. Rather than inventing something new, AAMP extends the standards the industry already runs on, including OpenRTB, AdCOM and OpenDirect, into the agent era, and adds open-source buyer and seller agent toolkits, an agent registry and privacy and pricing safeguards. The latest release, AAMP 2.3, focuses on making agents reliable enough for everyday use, with stronger pricing guardrails, integrated privacy diligence and support for existing platforms such as Google Ad Manager. For the market, that matters: with several competing approaches emerging, a common, open standard means buyer and seller agents can talk to each other without every publisher needing a separate integration for every buying platform.

IAB Australia is now putting AAMP to the test locally through a sandbox pilot with Australian publishers, which kicked off in early October. The pilot tests the framework in a controlled environment, looks closely at privacy and governance alongside commercial outcomes, and feeds what Australian publishers learn back into the global standard. We're proud to confirm that Interplay has joined the Seller Agent Pilot.

Industry standards are often shaped by the biggest players in market, the publishers with large sales teams, in-house technology and long-standing agency relationships. Interplay has joined to represent independent publishers who don't have that scale or clout, so the way agents discover, price and buy inventory works for them too. Our ad operations team will be working hands-on with the seller agent tooling, testing how it fits real publisher workflows, and making sure the needs of independent publishers are heard while the standard is still being shaped, not after it's set.

For our partners, this means you don't need to build any of this yourself, or wait for the big players to work it out first. As Interplay learns through the pilot, we'll bring that knowledge, and in time the capability itself, to publishers across our network, so your inventory is ready to be discovered and bought by AI agents as that demand grows. If you're an existing Interplay partner and want to hear more, or be among the first to trial seller agent workflows with us, get in touch with your account manager.

If you're an independent publisher not yet working with Interplay and want to make sure you're ready for agentic buying, as well as getting more from your ad operations and revenue today, we'd love to talk: reach us at [email protected]