“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 want 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 to see duplicate bids and notice when an auction might have been manipulated or tampered with. In August, Prebid.org changed how TIDs work—now, each bidder receives a unique TID for the same auction, which essentially reduces visibility for the buy side.
Green denied that OpenAds was created as a direct response to the TID change, but admitted that the move “accelerated [the] announcement” of OpenAds. OpenAds, itself built on the Prebid codebase, can be used by a variety of users but is designed to primarily service publishers.
O’Sullivan said that The Trade Desk views OpenAds as a wrapper designed to work in conjunction with Prebid.js and other wrappers for managing header bidding.
“We’re in a position to create this wrapper, and create better signal, and to participate in a conversation to make the ecosystem better,” Green said. “We’re just asking people to try it and to see if it will work better for them, and then give us the chance to prove ourselves.”
Green said that The Trade Desk has spoken to a handful of publishers who’ve resumed use of Transaction IDs after Prebid.org’s summer shakeup.
Prebid.org didn’t respond to a request to comment by publication.
New sell-side controls
The introduction of OpenAds has generated some controversy as some publishers and publisher-adjacent businesses have argued that The Trade Desk should not be encroaching into the sell side of the advertising business. Having some control over both sides of the auction, they argue, is risky; in fact, it’s the reason Google’s adtech business was found in violation of U.S. competition law this year.
The Trade Desk said it’s debuting publisher tools with the end goal of creating cleaner supply paths for advertisers on the buy side.
Pressed by Prebid.org chair Garrett McGrath about whether The Trade Desk was intentionally extending its business into the sell side, Green said, “I don’t believe that the auction is inherently a sell side function.” He said that servicing publishers via PubDesk is a “second-order effect” of trying to “ help buyers have the most efficient supply chain possible.”
Pushed again by McGrath, however, Green admitted that “for some,” The Trade Desk might be reconstituting what is considered a sell-side tool.