Publisher / seller track

AdCP publisher track (B1-B4): build and operate a sales agent. Product catalog design, creative specs, delivery reporting, and a sales agent build project.

Publisher / seller track (B1–B4)

Members only — Requires Basics credential (A1–A3). Four modules, ~105 minutes total.

This track teaches you to build and operate the supply side of AdCP. You’ll learn how sales agents represent publisher inventory, how buyer agents discover and evaluate your products, and how to expose delivery data and signals for measurement. The track culminates in a build project where you create a working sales agent.

Completing this track (plus A1–A3) earns the AdCP practitioner credential.

Is this track for you?

AdCP gives publishers a single endpoint that AI buyer agents can use to discover your inventory, negotiate and create media buys, and pull delivery data — without a sales call, a custom API integration, or giving up your direct deal terms. One implementation; always-on access for buyers that operate autonomously.

Your role	Where to start	Modules that matter most
Ad operations / yield manager	B1, then B3	B1 (catalog design), B3 (delivery reporting, signals)
Sales / revenue	B1, then B2	B1 (what buyers see), B2 (creative specs)
Engineer / developer	B1 through B4	Full track — ends with building and validating a real sales agent
Executive / strategist	A1–A3 only	Track A covers protocol and ecosystem context; skip B unless you’ll implement

Engineers and ad tech builders should do B1–B4. Anyone else can pick the modules above and skip the rest.

What you’ll build toward

• B4 is a build project: you create a working sales agent that handles real buyer queries — product discovery, media buy creation, creative specs, and delivery reporting
• The agent is validated against AdCP storyboards, not just reviewed manually
• Completing B1–B4 (plus A1–A3) earns the AdCP practitioner credential

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B1: Designing your product catalog

~20 min | Prerequisite: A3

How a hosted sales agent works: product discovery, catalog integration, capability advertising. Walkthrough of designing your product catalog — including collections and installments for content-centric inventory like podcasts, CTV series, and live events — and configuring what buyers can discover about you.

Reading list

Product discovery

How buyer agents discover publisher inventory through get_products.

get_products task

Task reference: request schema, response schema, and examples.

Media products

How to structure products: formats, pricing, targeting, and availability.

Collections and installments

Model content-centric inventory: podcasts, CTV series, live events, and episodic content.

sync_catalogs task

Catalog synchronization: 13 catalog types, feed field mappings.

Capability discovery

How agents advertise their capabilities so other agents can discover what they offer.

Version negotiation

Advertise your supported adcp.major_versions; reject mismatched requests with VERSION_UNSUPPORTED.

Authorized properties

How publishers declare and authorize their properties for agentic transactions.

Media buy lifecycle

The state machine sellers must honor: pending_creatives → pending_start → active → paused/completed.

Key concepts

• Sales agent role — your always-on, AI-powered sales team that responds to buyer queries
• Product catalog design — products, formats, pricing models, targeting options, availability, and shows/episodes for content-centric inventory
• Catalog integration — sync_catalogs for product data, 13 catalog types, feed field mappings
• Capability advertising — get_adcp_capabilities so buyers know what you support
• Object-presence capability principle — capabilities are declared by the presence of an object, not by booleans. If you support a feature, include the object; if you don’t, omit it. Buyers check for the object, not for "feature": true.
• Version advertising — declare adcp.major_versions so multi-version buyers can migrate on their own schedule; validate incoming adcp_major_version and return VERSION_UNSUPPORTED when out of range
• Lifecycle commitments — create_media_buy MAY return pending_creatives or pending_start; MUST transition pending_start → active when the flight date arrives, and notify orchestrators via webhook. Rejection is only valid from the pending states
• Reporting declaration — every product MUST include reporting_capabilities (metrics, dimensions, cadence, measurement windows). Presence of this object declares get_media_buy_delivery support

Start B1 with Addie

“I’d like to start certification module B1.”

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B2: Creative specifications and format support

~20 min | Prerequisite: B1

Deep dive on list_creative_formats and how buyer agents discover what your inventory accepts. Guide to structuring creative specs, handling incoming creatives, and brand compliance.

Reading list

Brief expectations

What buyer briefs look like and how to structure products so agents can match them.

Example briefs

Real examples of product discovery queries from buyer agents.

list_creative_formats task

How creative format specifications work — dimensions, file types, render requirements.

Creative formats

Format definitions, technical specs, and the renders structure.

Implementing standard formats

Standard format IDs and how to implement them consistently.

Product refinement

How buyer agents refine searches and negotiate product parameters.

Key concepts

• Format declarations — list_creative_formats tells buyers what you accept
• Format vs manifest — the format is what you accept, the manifest is what gets delivered
• Handling incoming creatives — sync_creatives and build_creative validation and approval
• Brand compliance — understanding incoming brand.json, disclosure positions

Start B2 with Addie

“I’d like to start certification module B2.”

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B3: Measurement, signals, and optimization

~20 min | Prerequisite: B2

How to expose delivery data, measurement signals, and optimization levers through your sales agent. Integration with measurement platforms, audience handling, and account management.

Reading list

get_media_buy_delivery task

Delivery metrics: impressions, spend, completion rates, and performance data.

Optimization and reporting

How buyer agents use delivery data for campaign optimization.

Signals overview

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

Trusted Match Protocol

How publishers support impression-time execution for buyer use cases like cross-publisher frequency capping.

TMP Router architecture

Deployment, fan-out, and provider configuration for publishers.

get_signals task

Signal discovery: what measurement data is available and how to expose it.

activate_signal task

Enabling specific measurement on a campaign.

Accounts overview

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

Campaign governance

Seller-side governance checks: validate buyer purchases before executing them.

check_governance task

The governance validation task: intent checks, execution checks, statuses, and planned delivery.

Key concepts

• Delivery reporting — accurate, timely delivery data via get_media_buy_delivery
• Signals framework — get_signals and activate_signal replace fragmented measurement vendor integrations
• Audience handling — sync_audiences for accepting buyer audience data
• Execution integration — publishers participate in TMP by sending Context Match requests (page content + available packages) and Identity Match requests (user token + package IDs) to the TMP Router, then joining the results locally. This enables cross-publisher frequency capping and impression-time activation without exposing user identity and page context to the buyer simultaneously
• Account management — sync_accounts, list_accounts for managing buyer relationships
• Seller-side governance — when a buyer account has governance_agents (synced via sync_governance), call check_governance with governance_context + purchase_type + planned_delivery before confirming media buys
• Planned delivery — describe what you will actually deliver; the governance agent validates it against the buyer’s plan

Exercises

Given sample Context Match and Identity Match responses, determine which packages the publisher activates and what targeting key-values to set.

Broadcast delivery reporting: Given a broadcast product with measurement_windows: [{window_id: "c3"}, {window_id: "c7"}], a buyer calls get_media_buy_delivery two days after the flight date. Describe what data is available in each window, why the c7 window is still incomplete, and how the seller should represent delivery to avoid the buyer misreading partial data as underdelivery.

Start B3 with Addie

“I’d like to start certification module B3.”

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B4: Build project — your first sales agent

~45 min | Prerequisite: B3

Create a working sales agent that responds to real buyer queries. Point your AI coding assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) at the build-seller-agent skill file — it generates an agent validated against AdCP storyboards, with optional comply_test_controller scaffolding for deterministic lifecycle testing in sandbox mode. The skill tested is specifying correct AdCP behavior.

What you’ll build

• Product catalog with at least 3 products and sync_catalogs support, each product declaring reporting_capabilities
• get_adcp_capabilities that declares adcp.major_versions and validates adcp_major_version on incoming requests — including a truthful capabilities.idempotency.replay_ttl_seconds declaration
• Creative format support for at least 2 formats
• Handles get_products, create_media_buy, list_creative_formats, get_media_buy_delivery
• Account setup via sync_accounts
• Proper error responses for invalid requests — including VERSION_UNSUPPORTED, GOVERNANCE_DENIED, TERMS_REJECTED, IDEMPOTENCY_CONFLICT, and IDEMPOTENCY_EXPIRED where applicable
• Idempotency enforcement on every mutating request: reject missing or malformed idempotency_key with INVALID_REQUEST before touching business logic; cache only on success; scope per authenticated agent
• Lifecycle transitions: seller moves media buys through pending_creatives → pending_start → active and notifies via webhook on each transition

How you’ll validate

Run the media_buy_seller storyboard against your running agent:

npx @adcp/sdk@latest storyboard run my-agent media_buy_seller

The storyboard exercises the complete buyer workflow — discovery, account sync, media buy, creatives, delivery — and validates every response. See Validate Your Agent for setup and debugging.

Specialisms you can claim

Declare media_buy in supported_protocols and choose the specialism that matches your inventory model. Each specialism has a compliance storyboard at /compliance/{version}/specialisms/{id}/ that verifies your claim:

• sales-guaranteed — guaranteed with human IO approval
• sales-non-guaranteed — auction-based
• sales-proposal-mode — deprecated in 3.1; use sales-guaranteed + media_buy.supports_proposals: true instead
• sales-catalog-driven — catalog-driven commerce with conversion tracking
• sales-broadcast-tv — broadcast linear TV
• sales-social — social platform with self-service flows

See the Compliance Catalog for the full list.

Assessment rubric

Dimension	Weight	What Addie evaluates
Specification quality	20%	Can you specify an agent in AdCP terms?
Schema compliance	25%	Agent responses validate against AdCP schemas
Error handling	15%	Handles invalid requests with proper AdCP errors
Design rationale	20%	Can you explain and reason about design decisions?
Extension ability	20%	Can you extend the agent with new capabilities?

Passing threshold: 70%.

Any AI coding assistant is welcome (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, etc.). The skill tested is: “Can you specify correct AdCP behavior?”

Start B4 with Addie

“I’d like to start certification module B4.”

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What’s next

After completing B1–B4, you’ve earned the AdCP practitioner credential. From here you can pursue specialist modules:

• S1: Media buy — transaction flows, pricing, orchestration
• S2: Creative — asset workflows, format compliance
• S3: Signals — measurement, attribution, optimization
• S4: Governance — brand safety, campaign governance, compliance, policy registry
• S5: Sponsored Intelligence — conversational brand experiences