Governance Protocol

Draft for AdCP 3.0 - These governance protocols are under active development by the AAO Governance Working Group. Feedback welcome via GitHub Discussions.

The Governance Protocol provides standardized mechanisms for compliance, brand suitability, and quality control across advertising workflows. It enables specialized agents to evaluate, filter, and score advertising entities against configurable criteria.

Mission

Define and operate transparent, privacy-safe, brand-suitable campaign governance that encodes human heuristics in open protocol objects, making campaigns easy to launch, safe to scale, and measurable against verifiable outcomes for buyers, sellers, and auditors.

Protocol Domains

The Governance Protocol covers four distinct governance domains:

Domain	What It Governs	Key Mechanisms
Property Governance	Where ads can run	Property lists, compliance filtering, adagents.json authorization
Brand Protocol	Brand identity & agents	brand.json discovery, brand agent authorization
Content Standards	Brand suitability	Privacy-preserving content evaluation, calibration, validation
Creative Governance	What creatives are compliant	Format validation, content moderation, accessibility
Campaign Governance	What can be bought	Budget controls, approval workflows, policy compliance

Each domain has specialized governance agents that provide data, filtering, and scoring capabilities.

Working Group Areas

The AAO Governance Working Group is developing standards across six areas that inform these protocols:

Area	Focus	Protocol Impact
Brand Suitability	Safe, appropriate ad contexts	Property Governance, Content filtering, adagents.json
Brand Manifest & Standards Library	Machine-readable brand policies	Brand Manifest, Content Standards
Creative Standards & Validation	Technical and ethical creative criteria	Creative Governance
Process & Human Oversight	Human-in-the-loop checkpoints	All protocols
Regulatory & Compliance	Legal and regional frameworks	All protocols
Measurement & Verification	Proving compliance	All protocols

Architecture

Governance agents operate across the full campaign lifecycle:

• Setup time: Configure property lists, brand requirements, and compliance rules
• Execution time: Filter inventory and validate placements through cached rules and scoring
• Post-delivery: Measurement, verification, and reporting on compliance

Common Patterns

Feature Discovery

All governance agents advertise their capabilities via get_adcp_capabilities:

{
  "tool": "get_adcp_capabilities",
  "arguments": {}
}

Response (governance section):

{
  "governance": {
    "property_features": [
      { "feature_id": "mfa_score", "type": "quantitative", "range": { "min": 0, "max": 100 } },
      { "feature_id": "coppa_certified", "type": "binary" },
      { "feature_id": "carbon_score", "type": "quantitative", "range": { "min": 0, "max": 100 } }
    ]
  }
}

Brand Manifest

Buyers declare their brand identity, and governance agents automatically apply appropriate rules:

{
  "brand_manifest": {
    "brand_name": "ToyBrand",
    "industry": "toys",
    "target_audience": "children_under_13"
  }
}

When a governance agent sees this manifest, it automatically applies COPPA requirements, content filtering for children’s brands, and other industry-specific rules.

Prompt-Based Policies

Governance protocols support natural language prompts for policy definitions rather than rigid keyword lists:

{
  "policy": "Avoid content about violence, controversial politics, or adult themes. Sports news is excellent. Entertainment is generally acceptable.",
  "exclusions_prompt": "Block content containing hate speech, illegal activities, or ongoing litigation against our company."
}

This enables AI-powered verification agents to understand context and nuance.

Webhook Notifications

Governance agents notify subscribers when evaluations change:

{
  "webhook_url": "https://buyer.example.com/webhooks/list-changed",
  "events": ["list_updated", "property_removed", "score_changed"]
}

Integration with Media Buy

The Media Buy Protocol consumes governance data at multiple stages:

• Product discovery: Pass property_list_ref to get_products to filter inventory
• Media buy creation: Reference property lists to constrain where ads can run
• Authorization: adagents.json validates agent authority to sell properties

{
  "tool": "get_products",
  "arguments": {
    "brief": "UK video inventory for Q1",
    "property_list_ref": {
      "agent_url": "https://buyer-agent.example.com",
      "list_id": "pl_q1_uk_premium",
      "auth_token": "..."
    }
  }
}

Getting Started

Buyers:

1. Subscribe to governance agents for property data and brand suitability
2. Create property lists with filters and brand manifests
3. Aggregate results into final compliant lists
4. Share references with sellers (with auth tokens)

Governance Agent Implementers:

1. Implement feature discovery tasks (get_adcp_capabilities, etc.)
2. Implement stateful list management (CRUD operations)
3. Support webhooks to notify when evaluations change
4. See the Property Protocol Specification for detailed implementation guidance

Protocol Sections

Property Governance

Control where ads can run with property lists, compliance filtering, and publisher authorization via adagents.json.

Content Standards

Privacy-preserving brand suitability through calibration-based content evaluation and validation.