Approvals & reviews

Review media buys and creatives before they reach your inventory, with an advisory verdict on each.

When a gate in AI Business Rules is set to review, incoming media buys and creatives wait in Approvals & operations until a person decides. Ask “What’s waiting on me?” or call open_approvals.

What each item shows

Part	Contents
Request	The buyer, advertiser, products, flight, budget and, for creatives, the rendered asset.
Kind	create for a new buy, update for a change to a live buy, or a creative review.
Evaluation	The advisory verdict (Clearly on policy, Needs a look or Clearly against an explicit rule), the recommendation, and each check with its result.
Reviewer notes	Your notes. On rejection they become the reason the buyer sees.

The evaluation is advice. It never approves or rejects on its own, and a fresh evaluation never changes an item’s status.

Deciding

Approve or reject in the page, or with decide_media_buy_approval:

decide_media_buy_approval

{
  "approvalId": "appr_01JB7R2M4N6P8Q0S2T4V6X8Z0A",
  "decision": "rejected",
  "reviewerNotes": "We cannot run alcohol creative on our family programming. A non-alcohol variant would be welcome."
}

decide_media_buy_approval always asks the person to confirm before it acts.

What happens next

• Approved: the buy is forwarded to your inventory source. The outcome is recorded (all completed, all submitted, partial, or failed), and the buyer’s side moves to active once the source accepts.
• Rejected: the buyer’s AdCP task ends as rejected, with your notes as the reason.

Items waiting too long raise an aging notice, so buyers are never left pending without anyone knowing. If nobody eligible can approve, items stay held; they are never auto-approved.

Media buys on your storefront

open_media_buys_page lists every buy on the storefront, most urgent first. open_page (page: "media_buy_timeline") shows one buy’s stages (received, screened, decided, forwarded, accepted, delivering) with timestamps and where it is stuck.

Decisions are final

An item moves pending → approved or pending → rejected. Deciding an item that’s no longer pending fails (“Cannot approve an approval that is approved.”), so a double decision can’t slip through. A pending approval for a proposal draft becomes revoked when that draft is discarded.

When forwarding fails

Approval and forwarding are separate. If your approval is recorded but the forward to the inventory source failed, re-send it with retry_forward (the media buy id or its approval id). It reuses the same idempotency key, so a source that already received the buy can’t book it twice. The result is forwarded, forward_failed or awaiting_source. retry_forward asks the person to confirm.

Over REST

All under /api/v2/storefront:

Endpoint	What it does
GET /media-buy-approvals?status=pending	The queue, filtered by status (pending by default).
GET /media-buy-approvals/{mediaBuyId}	One item with its request and evaluation.
POST /media-buy-approvals/{mediaBuyId}/evaluate	Run the advisory evaluation again.
POST /media-buy-approvals/{mediaBuyId}/decide	decision (approved or rejected) and optional reviewerNotes.
POST /media-buys/{mediaBuyId}/retry-forward	Retry a failed forward.

Not available yet

• A delivery-readiness block on pending items (packages without a creative, creatives that don’t fit and why, creative sync failures). Check the buy’s creatives on the timeline before approving.