The Trade Desk Details OpenAds features for Supply Chain Transparency
The Trade Desk on Tuesday revealed new details about how its recently launched supply path product OpenAds will work.
Debuted earlier this month, OpenAds has been positioned as a prebid wrapper created with the intention of improving supply chain transparency and giving media buyers a direct route through which to access publisher ad space.
The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green and vice president of product Mike O’Sullivan described the new features of OpenAds at an event in New york hosted by Prebid.org, a nonprofit platform that sets standards for programmatic advertising and helps publishers manage header bidding. In August, Prebid.org made changes to the Transaction ID marker in bid requests meant to improve privacy that resulted in limited insight from media buyers.
this is the first time The Trade desk has shared details about how OpenAds will work from a technical outlook, with Green and O’Sullivan describing four key features. These features are meant to give publishers greater visibility into ad auctions and help them verify demand as legitimate.
The first feature is called Auction code Attestation. This is a way of cryptographically proving that the code running within the real-time infrastructure running ad auctions is identical to the code visible in a public database or local copy.in short, it’s meant to ensure that the code that users see in the OpenAds GitHub repository actually matches what is being executed.
The second feature, the Sincera Integrity Signature, surfaces deterministic evidence of instances in which bid request fields are manipulated. “So, if someone is swapping out an ID silently, the signature will snap. It’ll break,” O’Sullivan said. “If someone is modifying the Transaction ID to overwrite it with the previous value-becuase you’re rendering an ad for a bid that we sent in 45 minutes ago-the signature will snap.”
The third flagship feature, Auction Audit, enables publishers to monitor the auction more closely, giving them access to a breadth of data signals including the number of bids on their inventory, who placed the bids, how often an auction ran a specific ad unit, and more.The Trade Desk hopes that the audit function will help publishers “verify that nobody’s putting their thumb on the scale,” O’Sullivan said.
The Auction Audit feature will be accessible via sellers.json, a file type created by IAB Tech Lab that signifies who is authorized to sell or resell a specific publisher’s ad inventory, and also via PubDesk, The Trade Desk’s new dashboard for publishers. PubDesk is currently accessible to users of OpenPath, the company’s tool for linking buyers directly to premium publishers.It will become available to non-OpenPath users after Thanksgiving, the company said.
The fourth and final core pillar of OpenAds is Transaction ID-yes, the same cross-exchange identifier that was disabled by Prebid.org in August.
“Transaction IDs, in and of itself, are not really a feature, but they allow for such a great degree of precision in unpacking and detecting and finding all sorts of issues, the least of which is duplication,” O’Sullivan said. “One of the things that came out of this Transaction ID discussion and debate is this sense of, ‘Well, we’re not going to give this data because we don’t wont people to use it, or we don’t want buyers to to bid shade….but this is doable with timestamps.”
Transaction ID changes
Historically, Transaction IDs were meant to be consistent across all bidders for a given auction, which enabled buyers and demand-side platforms t
The Trade Desk’s Expansion into publisher Tools Faces Scrutiny
The Trade Desk (TTD) is facing criticism for its move to offer tools directly to publishers, a move some see as encroaching on the sell-side of the advertising ecosystem. Concerns center around the potential for conflicts of interest, mirroring the issues that led to Google being found in violation of U.S. competition law earlier this year. A federal judge is currently considering remedies for Google’s “illegal monopoly” in ad exchanges and ad servers.
The Trade Desk argues its new publisher tools,including OpenAds and PubDesk,are designed to create more transparent and efficient supply paths for advertisers – a buy-side focused initiative. CEO Jeff Green maintains that the auction process isn’t inherently a sell-side function, and that providing services to publishers is a secondary effect of optimizing the supply chain for buyers.
However, under repeated questioning from Prebid.org chair Garrett McGrath, Green conceded that The Trade Desk’s actions could be perceived as recreating sell-side tools. He defended the speed of this approach, stating that while it may be contentious, it’s “facilitating the dialog that we need to be having.” Green framed the issue not as a buy-side versus sell-side conflict, but as a matter of ensuring fair revenue distribution for publishers – those currently underpaid and those possibly overpaid.
green also directly criticized Google’s past practices, accusing them of manipulating the auction “as much as the law will allow, and even maybe a little beyond that.”
The Trade Desk’s stock has experienced a important downturn this year, falling 56% as of late 2023, partially attributed to platform changes. Recently, the company discontinued a controversial feature within its Kokai interface.
Sources Used for Verification & Updates:
* Adweek – google Adtech Antitrust Remedies Hearing takeaways: https://www.adweek.com/media/google-adtech-antitrust-remedies-hearing-takeaways/
* Adweek – The Trade Desk Sunsets Controversial Kokai Feature: https://www.adweek.com/media/exclusive-the-trade-desk-sunsets-controversial-kokai-feature-in-latest-redesign/
* Reuters – U.S. judge says Google illegally monopolized digital ad tech: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-says-google-illegally-monopolized-digital-ad-tech-2023-01-24/ (Provides context on the Google antitrust case)
* Yahoo Finance – The Trade Desk (TTD) Stock Price: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TTD/ (Verified stock performance as of November 27, 2023)
Note: The stock price was verified as of November 27, 2023, and is subject to change.