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Ad Buyer Agent

The Ad Buyer Agent is an automated advertising buying system built on CrewAI and the IAB OpenDirect 2.1 protocol. It receives a campaign brief, allocates budget across channels, researches seller inventory, builds recommendations, and books deals --- all through a single API.

You give the buyer a campaign brief describing what you want to buy. The agent does the rest: it discovers sellers, browses their inventory, negotiates pricing where your access tier allows, and books deals --- pausing for your approval before committing spend. The result is a set of confirmed order lines with full audit trail, ready for delivery.

Part of the IAB Tech Lab Agent Ecosystem --- see also the Seller Agent.

Alpha Release

The buyer agent is in active development. Core deal flow (brief, research, negotiate, book) is functional end-to-end. See PROGRESS.md for current roadmap status.

Key Capabilities

Discovery & Research

  • Multi-seller discovery via AAMP registry with trust verification and capability filtering
  • Channel-specialist agents research seller catalogs via MCP and A2A protocols
  • Progressive media-kit browsing from summary through full product details and pricing

Negotiation & Pricing

  • Tiered identity strategy with 4 access tiers (public, seat, agency, advertiser) and progressive rate discounts
  • Multi-turn negotiation with pluggable strategies (threshold, adaptive, competitive) over A2A conversations
  • Human-in-the-loop approval gate before committing spend

Execution & Booking

  • Structured campaign briefing with objectives, budget, dates, audience, and KPIs
  • Portfolio-manager agent splits budget across 4 channels (branding, CTV, mobile, performance)
  • Quote-then-book deal flow via IAB Deals API v1.0 with DealStore persistence
  • Linear TV scatter buying with DMA-level targeting, CPP/CPM pricing, and daypart selection

Observability & Lifecycle

  • Formal order state machine with 12 deal states, guard conditions, and audit trail
  • Event bus with 13 event types, fail-open emission, subscriber dispatch, and SQLite persistence
  • Persistent session management tracking conversation state, negotiation history, and deal context
  • Severity-based change request management for post-deal modifications

Access Methods

The buyer agent communicates with seller agents using three protocols:

Protocol Use Case Speed
MCP Automated tool calls --- structured, deterministic Fast
A2A Conversational discovery & negotiation Moderate
REST Operator dashboards, legacy integration Fast

CrewAI tools use MCP by default. A2A is used for discovery and complex negotiations. See Protocol Overview for detailed comparison.

API Endpoints

The buyer agent exposes 7 endpoints across 3 categories:

Category Endpoints
Health GET /health
Bookings POST /bookings, GET /bookings/{job_id}, POST /bookings/{job_id}/approve, POST /bookings/{job_id}/approve-all, GET /bookings
Products POST /products/search

See the API Overview for full details.

Documentation

Getting Started

  • Quickstart --- install, configure, run, and connect to a seller agent

Architecture & Reference

Guides

Integration