The Trade Desk OpenAds: How Sell-Side Solution Works – Executives Reveal Details
summary of The Trade desk’s OpenAds Initiative
This article details The Trade Desk’s launch of OpenAds, a new initiative aimed at increasing openness and integrity in programmatic advertising, notably for publishers. Here’s a breakdown of the key features and context:
Motivation: The initiative was spurred by concerns about manipulation and lack of transparency in the ad auction process, and was accelerated by Prebid.org’s changes to Transaction ID (TID) functionality. While The Trade Desk denies it was a direct response, the TID change certainly played a role.
Core Pillars/Features of OpenAds:
- Real-Time Bid Request Matching: This feature ensures that the bid request a publisher receives is the same one being executed,providing a check against manipulation.
- Sincera integrity Signature: Detects alterations to bid request fields.If data is swapped or modified (like IDs or Transaction IDs), the signature will “snap” and indicate a problem.
- Auction Audit: Gives publishers detailed data about thier auctions - number of bids, bidders, frequency of ad unit runs, etc. – to help them verify fair play and prevent manipulation. Accessible via sellers.json and PubDesk (The Trade Desk’s publisher dashboard).
- Transaction ID (TID): while not a feature in itself, OpenAds leverages TIDs for precise tracking and detection of issues like duplicate bids. This is significant because Prebid.org recently changed how TIDs work, reducing visibility.
Key Points about Transaction IDs:
* historically: TIDs were meant to be consistent across all bidders in an auction, allowing for detection of duplicate bids and manipulation.
* Prebid.org Change: Now, each bidder receives a unique TID for the same auction, hindering visibility for buyers.
* OpenAds Approach: the Trade Desk believes tids are valuable for detecting issues and argues that concerns about misuse (like “bid shading”) can be addressed with timestamps.Some publishers have already resumed using TIDs with OpenAds.
Accessibility & Integration:
* OpenAds is built on the Prebid codebase and is designed to work with Prebid.js and other header bidding wrappers.
* It’s initially available to OpenPath users (direct buyer-publisher connections) and will expand to non-OpenPath users after Thanksgiving.
* Access to Auction Audit is through sellers.json and PubDesk.
Controversy:
* Some publishers are concerned about The Trade Desk expanding into the sell-side, arguing it creates a potential conflict of interest due to the company’s position on both sides of the auction.
In essence, OpenAds is The trade Desk’s attempt to address transparency and integrity issues in programmatic advertising by providing publishers with more control and data, particularly in light of recent changes made by Prebid.org. They are positioning it as a collaborative effort to improve the ecosystem.