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S2: Creative mastery

Members only — Requires Practitioner credential. ~45 minutes with Addie. Combines hands-on lab and adaptive exam.
This specialist module tests your mastery of the creative protocol. You’ll work with sandbox agents to discover format requirements across channels, produce and adapt creative assets, sync them to publishers, and verify compliance. Addie evaluates both your hands-on work and your conceptual understanding. Passing earns the AdCP specialist — Creative credential.

What you’ll demonstrate

  • Identify the three creative agent interaction models and explain when each applies
  • Work with stateless agents (template/transformers): discover formats, preview with inline assets, build serving tags
  • Work with stateful ad servers: browse a creative library, generate tags per media buy, track delivery
  • Work with stateful sales agents: push creatives, preview in the publisher’s environment
  • Adapt a single creative concept across multiple channels and formats
  • Reason about format edge cases, accessibility, and provenance

Prerequisite reading

Core creative tasks

list_creative_formats

Format discovery: what specs does each publisher require?

build_creative

Creative generation and transformation from brand assets.

preview_creative

Preview creatives before deployment.

sync_creatives

Synchronize creative assets with publisher platforms.

Supporting concepts

Creative protocol overview

The creative protocol: assets, formats, manifests, and creative agents.

Creative specification

Formal specification for the creative protocol.

Formats reference

Format definitions, technical specs, and the renders structure.

Asset types

Images, video, audio, HTML5, and native asset specifications.

Creative manifests

Manifest structure: how creative packages describe their contents.

Channel guides

Channel-specific specs for video, display, audio, DOOH, and carousels.

Generative creative

AI-generated creative workflows and best practices.

Accessibility

Accessibility standards for advertising creatives.

Provenance

AI creative provenance and disclosure requirements.

Implementing creative agents

Architecture guide for building creative agents.

Creative governance

Creative governance

Feature-based creative evaluation: security scanning, regulatory compliance, and content categorization.

get_creative_features

The evaluation task that scores creatives against governance features.

Content standards

Buyer-defined content rules that constrain what creatives can contain.

Provenance verification

How governance agents verify AI creative provenance metadata.

Lab exercises

Interaction models

  1. Stateless transformation — Connect to a template agent, discover its formats, preview a template with sample brand assets (inline), and build a serving tag. No sync_creatives — everything is passed in the call.
  2. Ad server workflow — Connect to a pre-loaded ad server, browse the creative library with list_creatives, generate tags for multiple media buys using build_creative, and check delivery metrics.
  3. Push-and-preview — Connect to a sales agent, discover its accepted formats, push catalog assets with sync_creatives, and preview how they render in the publisher’s environment.

Cross-platform skills

  1. Format discovery — Query sandbox agents for supported formats, compare requirements across publishers
  2. Cross-platform adaptation — Adapt one concept across display, video, and native formats using build_creative with target_format_ids
  3. Compliance — Configure provenance metadata and disclosure requirements for AI-generated creatives

Assessment

DimensionWeightWhat Addie evaluates
Interaction models30%Correctly identifies and works with all three creative agent types
Cross-platform25%Adapts creatives across channels and formats
Compliance25%Configures disclosures, provenance, and regulatory requirements
Analytical skill20%Interprets creative feature evaluation and delivery results
Passing threshold: 70%.

Start this module

Start S2 with Addie

“I’d like to start the creative specialist module.”