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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 and property 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.

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What you’ll demonstrate

  • Create, update, list, and delete content standards
  • Create, update, list, and delete property lists
  • 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
  • Explain how governance domains compose — campaign, property, content standards, creative
  • Configure audience constraints on a campaign plan using policy categories and restricted attributes
  • Validate that check_governance correctly denies targeting that violates audience constraints

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Prerequisite reading

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Core governance tasks

property_lists

Create and manage property lists for inclusion/exclusion filtering.

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.

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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.

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.

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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. Content calibration — Calibrate sample content against your standards and interpret results
  4. Compliance verification — Verify that sandbox campaign deliveries meet governance requirements
  5. 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
  6. Policy resolution and compliance — Resolve policies from the registry, configure jurisdiction-scoped enforcement, verify that violations are caught
  7. 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.
  8. 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.

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Assessment

DimensionWeightWhat Addie evaluates
Protocol mastery25%Full governance protocol mastery across all domains including campaign governance lifecycle
Safety expertise25%Understands the three-party trust model, separation of duties, and how governance domains compose
Oracle understanding20%Understands AI-driven evaluation models and policy registry integration
Compliance skill30%Handles regulatory requirements, policy resolution, jurisdiction scoping, and audit interpretation
Passing threshold: 70%.

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Start this module

Start S4 with Addie

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