On October 1, AAO members gathered for our first Town Hall since the summer. Since our last Town Hall, the protocol, the community and the Board have all taken a big step forward.
The protocol: AdCP 3.2 is live
3.2 is built from what we learned running seven-figure campaigns across many buyers and sellers. It's backward compatible, so anything built on 3.1 keeps working. The headline advances:
- Platform power. Agents can run social and other platforms with their native budget optimization, against the cost controls the buyer sets.
- Reliable reporting. Reporting is built into the protocol, so a late report shows up as late, not as zero.
- Clean rooms. Products declare how your audience data can reach them, with native support for Snowflake, Databricks, GCP, Azure and AWS.
- Compact lifecycle. Tool definitions are up to 94% smaller, so agents are cheaper to run and easier to build.
- Trust you can check. AI-generated content is declared, do-not-run lists are honored, and measurement says who measured it.
Reliable reporting, clean-room activation and rights attestations are experimental in 3.2, so they can change with six weeks' notice. 3.2 came from this community: 50+ contributors, 158 RFCs and 1,000+ merged changes. 3.3 is already in working groups, and we're moving to shorter release cycles. Start with the official SDKs, and join a working group if you want a hand in what's next.
For the community: the Brand Council and the Marketing Collab
We introduced two new ways to build together as a pair.
- The Brand Council is a small group of standard-bearers for the marketing craft. They lead in public, guide the protocol and test it with their brands, and set the industry's agenda. Read the Brand Council post.
- The Marketing Collab is where brands, publishers, agencies and tech platforms run real-budget experiments on AdCP and share what works. It's open to Leader members. Read the Marketing Collab post.
Governance: a Board with every part of the industry
We announced our founding Board of Directors, with brands, agencies, publishers and technology providers all at one table, and we are still building it from here. We also welcomed new organizations and individual members this quarter. Every constituent is equal here, and the standard is negotiated, not imposed. Read about the board here.