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 general manager 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 information about how OpenAds will work from a technical perspective, 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—because 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 as JSON, a file type for sharing structured data, 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.