Buyer guide

Carbnn is where brands and the agencies that buy on their behalf find creators and creator networks, brief a media buy, and track it through to delivery. This guide walks through the buyer side end to end. For the terms used throughout (deliverable, product, media buy, proposal…), see the Product overview.

Who this is for

• Brands buying media directly for themselves.
• Media agencies planning and buying on behalf of one or more brand clients.

Signing up

When you create your account, you pick what you’re setting up: a brand or an agency (creators and creator networks are the other side of the marketplace — see the seller guide). That choice can be changed until you finish setup, after which it locks in.

Setting up as a brand

You give your brand a name and a short public-facing identity, then add a brand pack: your audience, tone of voice, and anything creators should always (or never) say about you. The brand pack is optional, but it travels with every brief you send, so a fuller pack means the agent and the sellers it talks to understand your brand faster.

Setting up as an agency

You set up your agency’s own identity, then add the brands you buy for. You can do this two ways:

• Add a brand directly — give it a name, domain and brand pack, and it’s ready to brief immediately.
• Invite a brand that already has its own account — send an email invite. Once the brand accepts, your agency can buy on its behalf, alongside anything the brand’s own team does.

You can add or invite more brands at any time; you’re not limited to what you set up during onboarding.

The Buy Agent

The Buy Agent is a chat: you describe what you want to advertise, to whom, and with what budget, in plain language, and the agent takes it from there.

Briefing. Pick the brand you’re briefing for (an agency chooses which client), then describe the campaign — audience, message, timing, budget. You can narrow what the agent looks at by channel (for example social, influencer, or online video) and by country, and change those filters mid-conversation.

From brief to proposal. The agent searches available inventory that matches your brief and recommends products from one or more sellers. When you’re happy with a selection, it puts together a proposal — a concrete set of products, pricing and dates — for you to review.

From proposal to media buy. Turning a proposal into a live campaign is the one step that spends money, and Carbnn never does that without you confirming it first. When the agent is ready to commit, it shows you exactly what it’s about to book — the products, the budget per package, the total, and the flight dates — and waits for you to confirm or decline. Nothing is booked until you click confirm; decline it and the agent will adjust based on what you tell it. The same confirmation step applies to cancelling a live media buy, since that can’t be undone.

Currency. Budgets and prices are shown in the currency the products you’re buying are priced in, so what you see on the confirmation is what you’ll be charged.

Every chat is scoped to one brand once you send the first message — start a new chat to brief a different brand.

Discover

Discover is where you browse instead of brief. It shows creator and creator network storefronts you can filter by category, region, and minimum audience reach. Each storefront lists what that seller has available, its audience, and past work. If something catches your eye, you can add products straight to a brief without leaving the storefront, and hand that off to the Buy Agent to finish putting the campaign together.

Creatives and creative review

Once a media buy is agreed, you attach the creative assets (from your creative library) to the packages that need them. The seller reviews each one and approves or rejects it — that decision sits with the seller, the same way a publisher signs off on an ad before it runs. You see the status of every creative (pending review, approved, or rejected, with a reason if it was rejected) and can re-send a rejected creative once you’ve fixed it.

For in-person or physical deliverables that need something shipped to the creator, the seller provides a shipping address and you mark it as shipped with a carrier and tracking reference; the seller then confirms it arrived.

Delivery and proof of performance

Once a media buy is live, you can check in on how it’s running: impressions, reach and engagement, both overall and broken down per package and per day. As proof of performance comes in — a link, screenshot, or metrics the seller attaches showing a deliverable actually ran — you can view it alongside the delivery numbers and leave comments if you have questions.

Spend confirmation queue

Your Home dashboard keeps a running list of anything waiting on your confirmation — media buys the agent has proposed to book, or cancellations it’s ready to make — so you never have to go hunting through chats to find what still needs a decision. Each item links straight back to the conversation it came from.

Buying programmatically

If you’re integrating an AdCP buy-side agent rather than using the Carbnn dashboard, see the public sales agent docs for the endpoint, authentication, and supported tools.