‘Creating more integrity for the auction’: The OpenAds debate takes over Prebid Summit
Illustration by Robyn Phelps / Shutterstock / The Current
When Prebid rendered its transaction ID (TID) unworkable across exchanges last month, it sparked debate throughout the ad tech community — and an announcement from The Trade Desk of a new product, OpenAds, that provoked even more conversation.
On Tuesday, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green and General Manager of Product Mike O’Sullivan took the stage at Prebid Summit to address questions — and misconceptions — surrounding OpenAds.
Green summed up the product mission with this: “The North Star is creating more integrity for the auction,” he said.
First, some background: TIDs help media buyers identify duplicate bid requests, but Prebid’s change made them unique to a single bidder. IAB Tech Lab leaders swiftly spoke out against the decision, warning that it “risks undermining the integrity and consistency of open technical standards …”
Earlier this month, Green announced in an op-ed for The Current that The Trade Desk created a wrapper that “reflects the mechanics and standards of Prebid prior to the TID change.” Built on that foundation comes OpenAds, a new product “designed to have the most fair and transparent auction the industry has ever seen.”
“When we talk about branching Prebid, we are talking about branching essentially the code that was in existence just a few weeks ago,” Green reiterated at Prebid Summit. “And on top of that, innovating, which is exactly what great open-source code enables: the ability to innovate on top of that and to continue to make a better ecosystem.”
Some in the ad tech industry took The Trade Desk’s announcement as pitting the buy side against the sell side. Green said that the provocation in his op-ed was intentional to accelerate “the dialogue that we need to be having.”
But he also stressed that it’s not an “us versus them” dynamic.
“It is [about] quality publishers who are taking home less than they should be, and publishers that are taking home more than they should be,” Green said. “Let’s make certain that we’ve created an environment where great buyers and sellers can connect in a way that has integrity and honesty.”
The key features of OpenAds
Onstage, O’Sullivan introduced four initial features that are key to OpenAds.
- Auction Code Attestation, which is a way to prove that the code in the OpenAds branch is the same code executing auctions
- Sincera Integrity Signature, which provides evidence of tampering with the bid request, such as modifying a TID
- Auction Audit, in which publishers can “check the oil” at any time — in other words, a publisher can check various data points on the auction, such as who is bidding, the highest bid, the number of bids and so on
- TID Compatibility, which ensures TIDs align with the OpenRTB specification
“These features are in service of buyer performance,” he said. “We win as an open internet, together, when we’re able to shift some of those budgets out of the walled gardens and into the open internet.”
The strategy to do that, he said, is simple: “Cleaner auctions lead to better buyer performance, and better buyer performance gravitates to high-quality environments, and that pulls spend from the walled gardens to the open internet.”