• by Joe Mandese , October 22, 2025

A quarter century after Silicon Valley coined the concept of "Vendor Relationship Management" (or VRM) to flip the marketing table from Madison Avenue's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) orientation to one in which consumers are in charge, the movement finally has a technical standard that could revolutionize the unidirectional nature of marketing.

The standard, P7012, developed earlier this year by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) -- the same entity that developed the standards for WiFi and other electronic and digital technologies that have reshaped our lives and commerce -- was developed in conjunction with Project VRM, a community and listserv organized by author and academic Doc Searls (The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Intention Economy), which have nicknamed it MyTerms, and the organizers promise it will radically alter consumer marketing in an era likely to increasingly shift toward AI-based agent-to-agent marketing.

Importantly, the MyTerms standard is a machine-readable one, and its developers believe it's not just agent-ready, but one that could replace the archaic client-server nature of most digital media and replace it with one that is more omnidirectional.

"We kind of got stuck in the client-server model," Searls said during a day-long meeting in Silicon Valley Monday, adding, "This is more of a server-server model."

The meeting, one of the group's periodic VRM Days, was used to workshop ideas for implementing, branding, socializing and platforming MyTerms for its official rollout early next year, with the goal of a new consumer marketplace being fully deployed by 2030.

The effort follows a number of movements designed to respond to the so-called "Surveillance Economy" spawned by big digital platforms harvesting and exploiting consumer identity and intent data for the purposes of marketing and to give consumers more control of who, what, when, where and why they do business with companies in the digital world.

"The idea is that there’s some things that need to be contractual here in the physical world," Searls explained, adding: "But in the digital world, you have to make it explicit. You need programming to operate it."

Searls acknowledged other well-intentioned movements, including the so-called "Self-Sovereign Identity" or SSI community, which to date has done a great job of generating awareness of the exploitation of consumer identities, but so far has failed to come up with a practical solution for implementing it.

“I think the idea is that instead of having a bunch of cookies on our computers, we will have a repository of agreements that we’ve made with lots of other parties," Searls told the Project VRM gathering, emphasizing that the MyTerms standard is "kind of identity-free, unless you require something more concrete than the agreement, which has the two signatories known to each other."

In other words, MyTerms is more a way for consumers to issue terms as the basis of agreements or contracts that companies -- including brand marketers -- could engage with as part of a new or ongoing relationship with a consumer, but those terms may or may not include identity data, and only if it's relevant to the agreement itself.

If this sounds a little esoteric, it's because MyTerms isn't just a technical standard, but a new -- arguably much-needed -- paradigm for consumer marketing.

And for what it's worth, I don't think many people in the ad industry truly understand it even when they discuss things like self-sovereign identity or agent-to-agent marketing.

When marketers and agencies talk about A2A, I think they often frame it in a way that it is still a unilateral marketplace in the spirit of CRM, but that instead of targeting consumers directly they will be targeting AI agents as proxies for consumers. In the world of VRM and MyTerms, it will be the other way around: consumers will be targeting companies and brands based on their needs, wants and desires vis a vis agents working on their behalf.

Much of what was discussed during the VRM Day workshopping of MyTerms still seems aspirational, but at least the community has something real, physical even -- a new technical standard capable of developing a machine-readable marketplace just as AI agents are poised to become the new intermediaries of industry. Not just B2C, but B2B. And if you buy into VRM, even C2B.

Due to the AWS outage coinciding with VRM Day, I think a video or any of the sessions is available to link to, but I was able to download a video from last week's Institute for Advertising Ethics day in New York City at which IEEE's John Havens gave a bit of a description for MyTerms (watch below).