What AdCP 3.2 Means for Marketers

Social, reliable reporting and your own data come to agentic buying

Agentic buying has come a long way this year, and the latest version of AdCP shows it. AdCP 3.2 is shaped by what the community learned from running seven-figure campaigns across many buyers and sellers, and from paying attention to what got in the way. One result: a top agency recently ran a social campaign through AdCP from start to finish, with conversion optimization, lead forms, audiences and catalog-driven creative all working the way they do on the platform itself.

That's a big deal for marketers. Social platforms take a large share of ad budgets, and many of their agent interfaces only let you read data. Now the same standard that books an audio campaign with a publisher can run a full social campaign, too.

Here's what else is new in 3.2 and what it means for you:

Let platforms do what they do best

Social and other self-optimizing platforms work best when you give them one budget to manage. With 3.2, you can do that and still set the guardrails you care about, like a cost cap, a cost target or a return-on-ad-spend goal. You can also ask what an outcome will cost before you commit, like the budget you'd need to reach 10,000 clicks, or which dates are open.

If a buy involves some back-and-forth, everything stays on record. A seller can propose a plan, you can ask for changes, the inventory can be held while you decide, and what you agree to is what runs.

Reporting you can rely on

Agents need data they can trust. If an agent has to check with someone every time the numbers look off, you lose most of the benefit of automating in the first place.

Reliable Reporting builds reporting into the agreement between buyer and seller. You can see which reports you're owed and whether each one is on time, late or missing, so a missing report shows up as missing instead of a zero. Buyer and seller agents can also compare their numbers. If a seller reports €1,000 in spend and the buyer sees €800, the gap gets flagged, and a person gets involved if the agents can't sort it out. This feature is currently in the experimental phase.

Bring your own data

Publishers and platforms can now spell out how your audience data can reach them, including through clean rooms and dataset shares. Clean room and cloud data companies helped build this part of the release, and AdCP now works with environments including Snowflake, Databricks, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS. This feature is currently in the experimental phase.

Trust you can verify

With more creatives made by AI and more data changing hands, marketers need ways to check what they're told. In 3.2, AI-generated content is declared, do-not-run lists are honored, and measurement shows who did the measuring, so you can tell whether a number came from the seller or a third party. That matters more as AI disclosure rules take effect in places like California and the EU. Rights grants can also carry attestations you can verify, which is experimental for now.

What to do next

You don't need to change anything to benefit from 3.2. Your partners will adopt the latest version on their own timelines, and until they do, 3.1 will continue to work. In the meantime, it's worth talking with the publishers, platforms and agencies you work with about which 3.2 features they plan to support and when, so you know what to expect.

A few features are labeled experimental. In AdCP, that means a feature is part of the standard and ready for partners to build on, but its details can still change as the community learns from live campaigns. Any breaking change comes with at least six weeks' notice, and a feature becomes stable once it has run in production and been tested by more than one company.

Much of this release started as a question from someone running real campaigns. This cycle, the community filed 158 proposals from more than 50 contributors, and many of them made it into the standard. If you'd like your questions to help shape what comes next, become a member of AgenticAdvertising.org or join the community.