As much of the industry knows by now, we were honored to announce our participation in the newly formed OpenRTB Consortium earlier this month. With more and more publishers looking to real-time bidding (RTB) as a key source of demand for their inventory, it’s critical to have the right standards in place to minimize friction between the buy and sell sides. As one of the top 2 sources for real-time biddable inventory in the online advertising ecosystem, we’re focused on building solutions to empower publishers to address the opportunities and challenges posed by programmatic buying, as opposed to reinventing the integration wheel with each new real-time demand source we bring into the REVV Marketplace.
The reality is that the ecosystem is only going to get more complex. Without basic standards in place, all players in the industry will be wasting time and resources working on what is effectively plumbing, when we should be spending time on innovations that create more value. I’m not suggesting that everything will be standardized — technology companies like the Rubicon Project won’t want to share competitive differentiators, but the basic communication between buy and sell platforms should largely be standardized.
There are many benefits to the OpenRTB Consortium for publishers. Minimizing friction and improving communication between technology platforms will simply bring additional efficiency to the bidding process – further enabling the right ad to the right user at the right time, at the highest rate possible. More importantly, creating standards will allow everyone in the ecosystem to focus on creating new value that can be distributed to participants on both the buy and sell sides.
Overall, this consortium will only continue to raise the bar for RTB innovation, ultimately providing publishers with an efficient and safe source of demand as part of their overall yield optimization strategy.