Initiate and negotiate deals

All deals start in the negotiation phase. In this phase, you create a proposal by identifying the deal participants—including yourself as the selling party—and sending terms for either a commitment or endeavor deal to the buying party. These terms include inventory channels, content quality and categories, and financial agreements. The buying party reviews the terms and can either accept or reject the deal. A deal remains in the negotiation phase until the buying party accepts it.

Workflow diagram

The workflow for deal creation applies to both endeavor and commitment deals. The following diagram illustrates the process and deal statuses outlined in the next section, which also includes links to the related workflows and provides additional guidance on the decisions you might need to make along the way. The main difference lies in drafting the deal terms, where the required deal terms vary by deal type. For details, see Deal creation differences.

TIP: There are two sets of status types, dealNegotiationStatus shown to the left of the main workflow and dealStatus on the right, that track each phase of a deal, from negotiation to completion. For details, see Deal phases and statuses.

Process overview

The following table outlines the process step by step and provides links to related workflows, while the diagram in the preceding section illustrates the decision-making workflow. These steps apply to both types of deals. For additional information, see Deal creation differences.

Step		Description	Notes
1		Use the Provisioning API to determine your account classification, retrieve your known agent information, such as known agent ID (KAID), based on the account ID assigned to you during onboarding, and to search buying parties.	This information is stored in the respective known agent object. See also Get started with the PDP API for selling parties.
2		Add your Deal participants including their KAID, contact information, and additional information.	You must declare a primary buying party and selling party in deal creation. Additional participants are optional.
3		Set terms and goals to start drafting your deal.	You must declare the deal type: commitment or endeavor. If you need to switch types later, you must create a new deal. For details, see Deal creation differences.
	a	(Optional) For deals with media spend goals, add contributing deals.	For best practices and requirements, see Contributing deals.
	b	(Optional) To facilitate monitoring multiple deals with media spend goals, group deals together as upfronts for reporting.	For best practices and requirements, see Group deals with upfronts.
4		(Recommended) Forecast your deal terms to determine whether the buying party has a high bid rate.	This step is recommended for decisioned deals that rely on minimum daily avails and minimum win rate. For details, see Forecast deal terms.
5		Send an initial draft of the deal proposal to the buying party for review.	The deal negotiation status is set to `PROPOSED`, while the deal is set to `PENDING_ACCEPTANCE`. For status details, see Deal phases and statuses.
6		Negotiate terms related to inventory, restrictions, and media spend goals.	The buying party can provide feedback through deal notes to explain why they chose to accept or reject the deal. Review the notes before you implement deal revisions for acceptance. You can also send your own notes to the buying party.
7		The buying party chooses to accept or reject the deal.	After the buying party accepts the deal, it enters the pre-flight phase, where the buying party might need to adjust configurations on their end to target the deal. If the buying party rejects the deal, you must start over and send a new deal to the buying party.
8		When the flight date starts and the deal has media spend, the deal status of the accepted deal changes to `LIVE`.	During the in-flight phase, The Trade Desk monitors the health of the deal and gives you and the buying party options to gain more value from your deals. You can also revise live deals, if needed.

TIP: You can look up deals you created with the deals query. For details, see Deal queries.

Deal creation differences

The workflow for deal creation applies to both endeavor and commitment deals. The main difference lies in drafting the deal terms, where the available terms vary by deal type.

For all core steps, follow Draft deal terms.
For financial terms, refer to the corresponding row in the table.
For additional requirements specific to commitment deals, see Create commitment deals.
For additional requirements specific to endeavor deals, see Create endeavor deals.

The following table lists deal terms for commitments and endeavors, with links to the relevant documentation for each deal type, and additional notes.

NOTE: Terms that support the Endeavor or Commitment deal type have a ✅ checkmark icon in their respective column. Terms that don't apply are marked as N/A, and terms specific only to one deal type are labeled accordingly.

Creation Term	Endeavor	Commitment	Notes
Deal participants	✅	✅	N/A
Deal terms	✅	✅	Commitment deals require additional bidstream signals to be sent.
Financial Terms	Endeavor-specific	Commitment-specific	Commitment deals have additional terms related to pacing.
Cancellation terms	N/A	✅	All commitment deals must include cancellation terms.
Expansion terms	N/A	✅	Expansion terms are optional.
Deal flight	✅	✅	N/A
Inventory composition terms	✅	✅	Commitments have additional subfields for deal expansion.
Content composition	✅	✅	N/A
Device composition	✅	✅	N/A
Inventory channel composition	✅	✅	N/A