Signals, audiences and identity

The distinction is ownership: an audience is buyer-owned data uploaded to a single seller, and a signal is a targeting dimension published by someone else. A signal definition is the published record of one signal in a data provider's adagents.json, and activation is the AdCP call that makes a discovered signal usable on a named destination.

• Audience vs Signal
  An audience is buyer-owned CRM data uploaded to one seller account with sync_audiences and not portable across sellers
• Hashed Identifier
  A hashed identifier is a SHA-256 digest of a normalized email address or E.164 phone number sent in place of the cleartext value
• Signal Activation
  Signal activation is the AdCP call that makes a discovered signal usable on a named destination
• Signal Definition
  A signal definition is one entry in a data provider's published adagents.json signals[]

Other sections

• Ad Tech Glossary — all 35 terms, A to Z
• Concepts and standards — The protocols themselves, the transports they run on, and the names the category is given.
• Agent roles, identity and discovery — The parties to an agentic trade, the identity each one publishes, and the directories that list them.
• Buying objects and campaign lifecycle — A bought campaign breaks into a media buy, its packages and the products behind them.
• Real-time execution and bidstream agents — These terms run at serve time, while an impression is being decided.
• Deals, pricing and negotiation — How a price is agreed and booked: quotes, deals, negotiation rounds, access tiers and trust status.
• Governance, privacy and compliance — The constraints a buy has to satisfy before it is allowed to run.
• About — Which specification each definition comes from, and the terms this glossary leaves out on purpose.