The Trade Desk Execs Share New Details About How Sell-Side Solution OpenAds Will Work

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. 

“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. 

The rollout of OpenAds is evidence of a larger mission, however, Green contended. 

“I don’t care if OpenAds itself is successful. I’m very happy if Prebid and/or others innovate and do something similar and are even better than what we are doing,” he said, adding: “Many people said to me, ‘Jeff, it would have been less contentious if you’d done this another way’….And my response to that is, yes, but this is faster.”

Green continued: “This is facilitating the dialogue that we need to be having. It is not buy side versus sell side. It is [about] quality publishers who are taking home less than they should be, and [other] publishers that are taking home more than they should be.”

Finally, Green tossed in a jab at Google, whose adtech stack is at risk of unravelling as a federal judge considers how to remedy what earlier this year was determined to be an illegal monopoly in ad exchanges and ad servers. “And let’s not perpetuate the legacy that Google started, which is, ‘Let’s fuck with the auction as much as the law will allow, and even maybe a little beyond that.’”

The Trade Desk’s stock is down 56% since the start of the year amid a handful of platform changes. Last month, The Trade Desk sunset part of its divisive Kokai interface.

Correction Oct. 15 at 9:18 am: A previous version of this story incorrectly said that the Auction Audit feature, could be accessed via sellers.json—it can be accessed via JSON files. Additionally, Mike O’Sullivan’s title was incorrectly listed as vice president of product, but he is general manager of product.