S4: Governance

AdCP specialist module S4: Governance protocol mastery. Content standards, property lists, campaign governance lifecycle, policy registry, and compliance automation with sandbox agents.

S4: Governance

Members only — Requires Practitioner credential. ~60 minutes with Addie. Combines hands-on lab and adaptive exam.

This specialist module tests your mastery of the full governance protocol. You’ll work with sandbox agents to manage content standards, property lists, and collection lists, execute the campaign governance lifecycle (plans, validation, outcomes, audit), resolve compliance policies from the registry, and reason about how governance domains compose. Addie evaluates both your hands-on work and your conceptual understanding.

Passing earns the AdCP specialist — Governance credential.

Specialisms this track prepares you to validate

The following specialisms fall under the governance domain. Each has its own compliance storyboard — see the Compliance Catalog for the full taxonomy.

Specialism	Status	What it covers
content-standards	stable	Content standards enforcement (brand safety, policy compliance)
property-lists	stable	Curated inclusion and exclusion lists for targeting and delivery compliance
collection-lists	stable	Curated inclusion and exclusion lists of content programs (shows, series, podcasts)
audience-sync	stable	Syncs buyer-provided audience segments into a platform for activation
governance-delivery-monitor	stable	Campaign delivery monitoring with drift detection
governance-spend-authority	stable	Conditional spend approval and human-in-the-loop governance

What you’ll demonstrate

• Create, update, list, and delete content standards
• Create, update, list, and delete property lists
• Create, update, list, and delete collection lists — program-level brand safety across platforms
• Calibrate content against standards and interpret results
• Create and validate campaign plans with budget authority and policy configuration
• Sync governance agents to accounts via sync_governance
• Execute the full governance loop: sync_plans, check_governance (intent + execution), report_plan_outcome
• Use the policy registry to resolve and apply compliance policies
• Interpret audit logs and reason about drift metrics
• Distinguish the three layers of brand safety:
  • Property lists — where ads run. Stateful lists of properties (domains, apps, CTV services) with include/exclude semantics. Filter supply at the inventory level.
  • Collection lists — what content ads run in. Shows, series, movies, and sports programs identified by distribution IDs (Gracenote SH/MV/SP). Program-level exclusions independent of which property carries them.
  • Content standards — per-impression adjacency. Buyer-defined rules that evaluate actual content (not metadata) at serve time via calibrate → execute → validate. Use for episode-level or ephemeral content.
• Explain when to use each layer alone and how they compose (most buyers use one or two)
• Explain how governance domains compose — campaign, property, collection, content standards, creative
• Handle GOVERNANCE_DENIED end-to-end: read the governance_context, identify the failed rule, correct the payload, and retry
• Walk through the 15-step seller verification of a signed governance_context (JWS): alg allowlist, typ match, JWKS resolution via SSRF-validated fetch, aud/sub/phase binding, jti replay dedup, revocation-list check. Explain why each step closes a specific attack (spoofed issuer, plan swap, token replay, key compromise).
• Apply governance across purchase_type values: media_buy, rights_license, signal_activation, creative_services. All share the same loop; media-buy-specific validations (channel compliance, seller concentration, pacing) apply only when the payload contains the relevant fields
• Explain the governance_context correlation model: governance agent issues an opaque token on first check; buyer attaches it to the media buy envelope; seller echoes it on execution checks so the agent reconnects each lifecycle event without re-deriving state
• Configure audience constraints on a campaign plan using policy categories and restricted attributes
• Validate that check_governance correctly denies targeting that violates audience constraints

Prerequisite reading

Core governance tasks

property_lists

Create and manage property lists for inclusion/exclusion filtering.

collection_lists

Create and manage collection lists for program-level brand safety.

create_content_standards

Define brand-specific content standards for automated compliance.

calibrate_content

Test whether content meets defined standards before placement.

validate_property_delivery

Verify that ads were delivered to authorized properties.

sync_governance

Sync governance agent endpoints to accounts for seller-side validation.

sync_plans

Create and update campaign plans that define authorized parameters.

check_governance

Validate intended and executed actions against the campaign plan.

report_plan_outcome

Report confirmed outcomes and commit budget against the plan.

get_plan_audit_logs

Review governance decisions, findings, and drift metrics.

Supporting concepts

Governance overview

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

Campaign governance

Multi-party validation, budget authority, and the trust model.

Campaign governance safety model

Three-party trust model: orchestrator, governance agent, and seller.

Campaign governance specification

Full technical specification: validation categories, budget tracking, and audience governance.

Policy registry

Community-maintained compliance policies: regulations (COPPA, GDPR, HFSS) and standards (alcohol, pharma).

Property governance

Identity, authorization, and data enrichment for publishers.

Collection governance

Program-level brand safety with collection lists across CTV, podcast, and other media.

Content standards overview

How content standards work: calibration, local execution, and validation.

Content standards implementation

Implementation guide for content standards.

Content artifacts

Artifacts generated during content evaluation.

Creative governance

Creative quality, compliance, and feature analysis.

Provenance verification

Verifying AI creative provenance and disclosure.

get_creative_features

Analyzing creative features for compliance evaluation.

validate_content_delivery

Post-delivery content validation.

get_media_buy_artifacts

Retrieving evaluation artifacts for audit and review.

Connecting to the test agent

Lab exercises run against the public test agent. Use the shared token — no signup required:

export ADCP_AUTH_TOKEN="1v8tAhASaUYYp4odoQ1PnMpdqNaMiTrCRqYo9OJp6IQ"
export AGENT_URL="https://test-agent.adcontextprotocol.org/governance/mcp"

See the Quickstart for a walkthrough of your first call.

Lab exercises

1. Content standards lifecycle — Create, update, and manage content standards for a fictional brand
2. Property list management — Create inclusion and exclusion lists for supply path control
3. Collection list management — Create a do-not-air collection list with distribution identifiers, content rating filters, and genre exclusions. Understand how collection lists compose with property lists and content standards for three-layer brand safety.
4. Content calibration — Calibrate sample content against your standards and interpret results
5. Compliance verification — Verify that sandbox campaign deliveries meet governance requirements
6. Campaign governance lifecycle — Sync governance agents via sync_governance, create a campaign plan, validate actions (intent + execution), handle denials and conditions, report outcomes, and review audit logs
7. GOVERNANCE_DENIED recovery — Submit a check_governance request that fails (audience uses a restricted attribute, or media buy exceeds committed budget). Read the denial reason, correct the payload, and verify the retry passes. Trace governance_context through the orchestrator → seller execution check to prove the correlation model.
8. Purchase type variation — Run check_governance with purchase_type: "rights_license" and purchase_type: "signal_activation" on the same plan. Observe which validations apply uniformly (budget, geo, flight) and which are media-buy-specific.
9. Policy resolution and compliance — Resolve policies from the registry, configure jurisdiction-scoped enforcement, verify that violations are caught
10. Audience governance — Configure a plan with policy_categories (e.g., fair_housing) that carry restricted_attributes. Submit check_governance requests with audience selectors that use restricted signals and verify the governance agent denies them. Then submit compliant targeting and confirm approval.
11. Audience drift detection — Run a series of delivery-phase governance checks with audience_distribution indices that gradually shift from baseline parity. Observe how cumulative indices reveal sustained bias patterns that single-period noise obscures, and how governance findings escalate when drift exceeds thresholds.

Assessment

Dimension	Weight	What Addie evaluates
Protocol mastery	25%	Full governance protocol mastery across all domains including campaign governance lifecycle
Safety expertise	25%	Understands the three-party trust model, separation of duties, and how governance domains compose
Oracle understanding	20%	Understands AI-driven evaluation models and policy registry integration
Compliance skill	30%	Handles regulatory requirements, policy resolution, jurisdiction scoping, and audit interpretation

Passing threshold: 70%.

Start this module

Start S4 with Addie

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