TL;DR: A bilateral deal record is a document generated at the point where two parties reach agreement on deal terms, and held in identical form by both parties simultaneously. In advertising, a bilateral deal record (called a DealSheet in Alkimi's infrastructure) captures the agreed CPM, inventory specification, audience parameters, deal period, and party identities, and is accessible to both the buyer and the publisher independently. Unlike a DSP deal setup or an SSP deal ID, a bilateral record cannot be modified by either party after execution, and neither party's version is authoritative over the other's.
The concept of a bilateral record is not specific to advertising. It is the standard instrument of enforceable agreement across commerce: a contract is bilateral when both parties hold the same document and both are bound by its terms. The innovation in agentic advertising is applying this concept to programmatic deal records, which have historically been unilateral: the buyer's DSP holds the buyer's record, the publisher's SSP holds the publisher's record, and neither is the authoritative source.
Why bilateral matters for reconciliation
Post-campaign reconciliation in programmatic advertising has been a persistent challenge because buyers and sellers reconcile against different records. The buyer's ad server shows one set of impression counts; the publisher's ad server shows another; the discrepancy is typically 10-15% and is accepted as a standard cost of doing business.
The discrepancy exists because the records are produced by different systems with different counting methodologies, different timestamp definitions, and different treatments of filtered traffic. Neither record is wrong by its own methodology; they simply measure differently.
A bilateral deal record does not resolve the impression counting discrepancy (that is a delivery question, not a deal terms question). What it does is establish a shared reference for what both parties agreed at the outset. The reconciliation question changes from "do our records agree on what happened?" to "did what happened match what we agreed?" The first question has two answers, neither authoritative; the second question has one shared reference point.
What a bilateral deal record contains
A bilateral deal record in the agentic advertising context contains, at minimum:
Deal identifier. A unique reference for the deal, assigned by the marketplace at the point of execution.
Party identifiers. The identities of the buy-side agent and the sell-side agent, linked to their respective mandate references. This connects the deal to the governance document under which each agent was authorised to act.
Agreed CPM. The price agreed at execution. This is not a bid; it is a commitment.
Inventory specification. The inventory the deal covers: publisher or domain, placement, format, time period, and any audience parameters included in the deal terms.
Execution timestamp. The date and time at which both parties' agents confirmed agreement.
Marketplace reference. The identity of the marketplace where the negotiation occurred. This is relevant for any audit that needs to verify the deal record's provenance.
What a bilateral deal record is not
A bilateral deal record is not an impression log. It does not record what was delivered; it records what was agreed. Delivery records are produced after the deal executes, by ad servers. The deal record is the reference against which delivery is evaluated.
A bilateral deal record is not a deal ID. A deal ID is a configuration parameter in a DSP and an SSP. It is a technical reference for the impression-serving machinery; it is not a shared document. The same deal ID will appear in both the DSP and the SSP, but the records they are attached to are separate and may diverge.
A bilateral deal record is not the same as a contract in the legal sense, though it may have contractual implications depending on the terms of the marketplace agreement and the applicable law. Buyers and publishers should take legal advice if they intend to rely on a DealSheet as evidence in a dispute.
How to evaluate whether a marketplace provides genuine bilateral records
Not all platforms that use the term "deal record" provide records that are genuinely bilateral. When evaluating a marketplace's deal record infrastructure, the relevant questions are:
Does both the buy-side and the sell-side hold the same document at the point of execution, or does each hold a separate record?
Can either party modify the record after execution, or is the DealSheet read-only from the moment of execution?
Is the record accessible to both parties through the marketplace's API, independently and without the cooperation of the other party?
Does the record contain the party identifiers, mandate references, and execution timestamp needed for a compliance audit?
A marketplace that can answer yes to all four questions is providing genuine bilateral deal records. A marketplace that cannot is providing a deal log, which is a useful operational tool but a different thing.