The programmatic advertising landscape is constantly evolving, and one of the latest developments comes from The Trade Desk with its new product: OpenAds

What is OpenAds?

OpenAds, developed by The Trade Desk, is based on Prebid’s open-source framework – the technology that has powered thousands of online ad auctions for years. Similar in concept to wrappers from Prebid.org and Amazon Publisher Services, OpenAds facilitates programmatic auctions with built-in verification features that enable auditable and standardized auction processes, all operating within The Trade Desk’s infrastructure.

How Trade Desk wants to win

The Trade Desk claims that OpenAds is supposed to bring several advantages for the digital advertising ecosystem:

• Increased transparency: OpenAds provides open, auditable auction logic and uses code attestations, allowing advertisers and publishers to verify what is actually running in the system. By removing manipulation and “noise” in auctions, outcomes are predictable and fair.
• Improved performance: By eliminating unfair practices such as request duplication, metadata manipulation, and dynamic take rates, OpenAds enables more efficient use of advertising budgets, so advertisers only bid on high-quality impressions.
• Better insights: Transparent and auditable auctions allow publishers to analyze bidder strategies, understand the true value of their inventory, and make informed decisions about pricing and yield management.

At the same time, some might notice that full visibility and data control remain with The Trade Desk. While this setup can greatly enhance efficiency for buyers, it surely will be less open to other participants in the ecosystem.

Expert Perspective

A few words from our CPO, Marcin Hajduk:

“Having as strong a market position as The Trade Desk does, building its own auction wrapper seems like a natural evolution of its system, allowing it to better compete with Amazon, which did exactly the same with APS. Such a setup would also enable The Trade Desk to process far more data than it could as a Prebid bidder alone, since it would gain full visibility into the bidding behavior of other auction participants. Naturally, this information would be available only to The Trade Desk and not to other ‘OpenAds’ bidders. More is not always better, but if this solution does not impair ad speed too much, it might be an interesting addition to the existing ad stack. That’s the key, though – it’s an addition, not a replacement for Prebid or APS.”

Key Takeaways

OpenAds is an interesting development in programmatic advertising and is the next phase of The Trade Desk’s Open Path initiative. It lets the company use its strong market position to improve efficiency by gaining direct insight into auction dynamics. With this visibility, they can fine-tune their bidding and improve performance and revenue. Even if some data is shared with other auction participants, The Trade Desk is likely to benefit the most. That said, publishers can also gain, provided that OpenAds is tested carefully and used as an addition to the current header bidding setup, not a full replacement of it.