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A3: The AdCP landscape

Free module — No account required. ~15 minutes with Addie. Prerequisite: A2.
This is the survey course. Touch everything, go deep on nothing. You’ll get a map of the entire AdCP ecosystem — every protocol domain, every discovery mechanism, every governance layer. Designed to pique your curiosity and show you where to go deeper. Completing A1 + A2 + A3 earns the AdCP basics credential.

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Learning objectives

  • Describe what brand.json is and why every brand should have one
  • Explain adagents.json and how agents discover each other
  • Name all eight AdCP protocol domains and what each covers
  • Identify which areas you want to explore deeper in a role track

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Reading list

Brand protocol

Brand identity claims, brand.json discovery, and brand hierarchy. Four variants: house portfolio, brand agent, redirects, minimal.

Governance overview

The governance protocol: property governance, brand governance, content standards, creative governance, and campaign governance.

Campaign governance

Always-on compliance: ties campaigns to media plans, validates every transaction through three independent parties.

Policy registry

Community-maintained library of advertising regulations and standards that brands reference by ID.

Creative protocol

The creative protocol: assets, formats, manifests, creative agents, and 20 channels of adaptation.

Signals overview

The signals protocol: audience segments, contextual signals, measurement data, and optimization.

Sponsored Intelligence

Conversational brand experiences in AI assistants — a genuinely new advertising model.

Capability discovery

How agents advertise what they support so other agents can discover them.

Accounts protocol

The commercial layer: advertisers, operators, authentication, billing, and account lifecycle.

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What you’ll cover with Addie

Addie walks through each domain with a quick live example — just enough to understand what each area does: Discovery and community:
  • brand.json: your brand’s machine-readable identity at /.well-known/brand.json
  • adagents.json: how publishers declare which agents can access their inventory
  • Community registry: how agents and brands find each other
  • AgenticAdvertising.org: working groups, industry councils, how the spec evolves
Protocol domains:
  • Accounts — commercial identity, operator-billed vs agent-billed, account lifecycle, get_adcp_capabilities
  • Media buy — proposals, forecasting, refinement, packages, keyword targeting, geo-proximity
  • Creative — formats vs manifests, 20 channels, AI-powered generation with build_creative
  • Signals — audience data, privacy-compliant signals, conversion tracking, attribution
  • Governance — content standards, property lists, the Oracle model for AI-driven brand safety, campaign governance (multi-party validation, budget authority, policy registry)
  • Sponsored Intelligence — conversational brand experiences, cost-per-conversation instead of CPM
  • Brand Protocol — brand.json resolution, brand identity claims, brand hierarchy
  • Registry — entity resolution, agent discovery, community directory

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Assessment

Passing threshold: 70%.

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Start this module

Start A3 with Addie

Open Addie and say “I’d like to start certification module A3.”
Next: Choose your role track — Publisher, Buyer, or Platform