Glossary
Programmatic guaranteed (PG)
Published · Last updated
Next scheduled review:
Programmatic guaranteed is a deal type in which a seller commits a fixed number of impressions to one buyer at a fixed price, and the transaction is executed through the programmatic pipes, with a deal ID in the bid request and an obligation on the buyer to bid on every eligible impression, rather than through a manually trafficked insertion order.
In OpenRTB the fixed price is expressed with deal.at: 3, where "the value passed in bidfloor is the agreed upon deal price," and pmp.private_auction: 1 restricts the impression to the deal (OpenRTB 2.6, sections 3.2.11 and 3.2.12). The guarantee itself lives outside OpenRTB, in the ad server's line item and the contract; OpenDirect is IAB Tech Lab's API for booking such lines, and the Deals API synchronises the deal record between the two sides (IAB Tech Lab, 4 December 2025).
PG matters now because it is the execution rail that agentic protocols assume. AAMP 3.0's OpenProposal describes a lifecycle that ends in "Bind & Execute" through OpenDirect, AdCOM and the Deals API (IAB Tech Lab, 22 September 2026); AdCP's create_media_buy task lands on whatever deal structure the seller offers (AdCP, What's new in 3.0). A seller that already runs PG has the "execute" half of agentic buying in place.
Example: a retail media network sells a brand 5 million homepage impressions in December at $15.00 CPM; the ad server holds the guaranteed line; each bid request carries "deals": [{ "id": "PG-DEC-ACME", "bidfloor": 15.00, "at": 3 }]; the brand's DSP must respond with dealid: "PG-DEC-ACME" on every eligible request.
Source: IAB Tech Lab, OpenRTB 2.6, Deal.at; IAB Tech Lab, Deals API v1.0 and OpenDirect.