Jargon Buster

When a web site owner or publisher displays an advertisement (such as a promotional link) on its site for a brand or merchant and is paid for the performance of the advertisement, this is known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing activity generates large amounts of online sales in the UK and worldwide. 

A type of autonomous AI that can make decisions, take actions, and learn on its own to achieve specific goals. It’s akin to having a virtual assistant that can think, reason, and adapt to changing circumstances without needing constant direction. Agentic AI can be used in self-driving cars, supply chain management, cybersecurity, and in healthcare diagnostics and treatment recommendations.

A website or computer application that pulls together information from diverse sources. There are different types of aggregators, in the advertising industry, these notably include content, data, news, social media, and/or video aggregators. 

Typically built to do specific tasks such as like answering questions or setting reminders. AI Agents are great at automating simple, repetitive tasks but don’t have the autonomy or decision-making abilities that Agentic AI does. AI Agents are used in customer service via chatbots to answer questions and guide customers through processes, in voice assistants to help set reminders and play music and in productivity tools which can help in things like software development by suggesting code and helping with debugging. 

The AI Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) is an IAB Tech Lab project focused on creating a secure controlled gateway for publishers to share their content with Large Language Models (LLMs). The aim is to address concerns regarding the growing use of AI agents, LLMs and AI-driven search summaries - protecting the intellectual property of publishers while still allowing AI systems to learn and create outputs from content. Find out more via IAB Tech Lab.

The use of AI systems to test, analyse and improve advertising creative to maximise performance against a defined goal such as clicks, conversions or attention. What it does in practice is it analyses creative elements, predict performance, test variations at scale and automatically adjust or generate creatives. Also see Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) here. 

The policies, processes and oversight that ensure AI systems are developed and used responsibly, ethically, securely and in compliance with legal and organisational requirements. 

The field focused on ensuring that AI systems behave reliably, predictably and without causing unintended harm. It includes techniques and policies to reduce risks such as bias, misinformation, unsafe outputs or uncontrolled behaviour.

A set of instructions or rules designed to perform a task or solve a problem. In AI, algorithms are often used for learning patterns or making predictions from data. Online, algorithms are commonly used to determine the listings shown via search engines and for automated methods of ad trading and delivery.