Connect a demand partner

A demand partner becomes able to buy an organization’s airtime after four things have happened, in this order, done by two different people.

This page is the sequence. Managing demand partners owns every field and the detail of what each setting does; this page says what to do in what order and what to check afterwards.

Step 1 is the platform administrator’s. Steps 2 and 3 belong to the organization’s owner, admin or manager. Step 4 is a conversation with the partner.

The four steps

Step Who Result

1. Register the partner

Platform administrator

One row in a registry the whole installation shares

2. Enable it for the organization

Owner, admin or manager

This organization will sell to it, using its own connection details

3. Admit it in a price list

Owner, admin or manager

It is asked when a face that price list covers has a slot to fill

4. Give it what it needs to call in

Whoever talks to the partner

It can read your catalog and submit creatives

Each step is necessary and none is sufficient. A registered partner nobody enabled buys nothing. An enabled partner no price list admits is not asked when a slot comes up. A partner with no token of yours has nothing to authenticate with, so it cannot get a creative approved — and a bid is only worth something if there is an approved creative behind it.

1. Register the partner

Registering a partner is the platform administrator’s work. It adds one row to a registry the whole installation shares. The kind of buyer fixed on that row at registration decides whether the partner bids at all, whether a second row of that kind may exist, and which protocol the platform speaks to it — so it is worth agreeing with the partner what it should be before it is registered.

Integrations explains what that decides, and Managing demand partners lists every field with its constraints.

2. Enable it for the organization

In the client cabinet, on Settings → Agencies (/settings/agencies). Every active registry row appears there as its own block.

Set Enabled, and fill in the partner’s URL and the token the partner issued to you. That token is the one the platform presents when it calls the partner. The token the partner presents when it calls you is your organization’s access token, covered in step 4. Leave the automated guaranteed URL blank unless the partner will book automated guaranteed campaigns, and fill in whatever additional fields the block shows — those are a property of the system type rather than a choice.

3. Admit it in a price list

A partner that is enabled but named in no price list is not offered a slot.

Open /prices, open the price list covering the faces you want this partner to buy, and either name it in a priority group or make sure a group written as an exclusion list does not exclude it. Minimum viable pricing does this from scratch; Price lists covers both shapes.

4. Give it what it needs to call in

The partner needs four things from you before it can read your inventory or submit a creative:

  • its provider id, as registered in step 1;

  • your organization’s identifier, shown on Settings → Agencies;

  • your organization’s access token, shown on the same screen — see Access tokens;

  • which version of the protocol to build against, if it speaks the platform’s own one.

Partners on their own protocols — the platform implements an adapter for each — need only the first three; Supported partners says which is which.

Before you hand over the access token, confirm who is asking and that the request comes from the partner you registered.

Confirming it works

In the same order the partner will exercise it.

  1. The partner can read your catalog. It reads your catalog under its own provider id and gets back your active faces. An authentication error here points at the token, the organization identifier or the enablement in step 2; a permission error points at the system type chosen in step 1, or at an organization that has been switched off.

  2. A creative arrives. The partner submits one and it appears in Incoming requests (/requests) for your moderators to review. Nothing the partner bids can play until a creative of its has been approved and delivered to the content management system — see Creative approval.

  3. Bid requests reach it. Once a face that the price list covers has a slot to fill, the partner is asked. It has a little over a second and a half to answer, and an answer that arrives later is not used. See Timing budget, which is the first thing to read if a partner insists it is bidding and your reports disagree.

  4. A win is recorded. A winning bid produces a row for the answer to that ad request, and a confirmed play turns it into revenue. See Reporting.

If the partner is not bidding, Managing demand partners closes with the checklist to work down, in the order that eliminates the most causes fastest.

Good to know

Partners are asked together

Every partner a price list admits is asked at the same moment. In a price list’s waterfall mode the first usable answer wins. See Waterfall mode.

Partners and content management systems are set up separately

Registering a buyer says nothing about what runs the screens, and connecting a content management system says nothing about who may buy. See Integrations.

Undoing it

Each of the first three steps has its own off switch, and they do not reach equally far: the platform administrator can stop the partner across the whole installation, clearing Enabled stops it for your organization alone, and taking it out of a price list stops it only for the faces that price list covers while leaving its inbound access working.

Which one to reach for, and what the partner notices in each case, is tabulated in Managing demand partners.