Programmatic Guaranteed Terms and Rate Negotiation

Buy programmatic guaranteed when it purchases something the auction cannot sell you: a fixed date, a named position, or a delivery commitment you can plan a launch around. If the only difference from open-auction access to the same domain is the rate, the contract is not worth signing. Guaranteed rate cards in these categories sit well above what the same inventory clears at in auction, and that gap buys certainty of delivery. It does not buy different inventory and it does not buy more attention. What actually gets negotiated: Rate is the fourth item on our list. Ahead of it: whose ad server is the system of record for billing, what discrepancy between the seller's count and your DSP's count is tolerated before it becomes a credit, what the remedy is for under-delivery and how long the publisher has to cure it, and whether the flight can be cancelled and on what notice. A guaranteed deal that under-delivers is a seller-side pacing problem your DSP cannot fix from the buy side, which makes the remedy clause the substance of the deal and the rate a consequence of it. Counting, specifically: Differences between a seller's ad server and a buyer's DSP are structural rather than suspicious, because the two count at different points in the impression lifecycle. We agree the tolerance band in writing and agree what happens above it. Where the campaign carries a viewability expectation we name the vendor, IAS, DoubleVerify or Moat, name the standard being applied, and settle whether guaranteed impressions bill on served or on viewable. Those three lines close nearly every argument that would otherwise arrive in month two with an invoice attached. Where guaranteed earns its rate in our categories: A property launch with a sales centre opening on a fixed date, where reach has to exist on a particular day rather than on average. A league fixture or tournament window, where the audience assembles for ninety minutes and the auction price for it triples inside that hour. A trade publisher in manufacturing whose readership is the buying committee itself, a few thousand people whose attention cannot simply be bought again next month. What we refuse: Guaranteed buys with an acquisition-cost target attached, because the two ideas are in conflict and one of them will be quietly dropped later. Rates locked for longer than a quarter. Sponsorships repackaged as a guaranteed line item at a price that assumes nobody will check the auction. Deals where the publisher will not put a makegood or a rate credit in writing. And we do not negotiate against a rate we cannot verify; if the auction price for that inventory is unknown, we run a short auction test first and negotiate afterwards. Who this is not for: Buyers who need to move budget between publishers weekly. Direct response programmes with no reach objective. Teams without a trafficking resource able to approve creative inside the publisher's lead time, since a guaranteed flight that starts without approved creative bills anyway. How we work: We take your objectives and constraints, price the auction alternative, then negotiate with the publisher or sales house directly, in Hebrew with Israeli sellers and English elsewhere. You see the term sheet before anything is agreed and we do not sign on your behalf. Once agreed, we sit with your trafficker and the publisher's ad operations team through the first delivery week, which is when pacing faults surface. You finish holding the contracts, the terms, and a written note of what we conceded and why, so the second negotiation with the same publisher starts from a known position.