• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, April 17, 2017

As native ad formats are increasingly traded programmatically, the Native Ads subcommittee of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) OpenRTB Project has released version 1.2 of the OpenRTB Native Ads API Specification. It’s available for industry comment until May 17.

The new spec adds dynamic creative optimization (DCO), support for third-party ad serving, privacy flags, and new event tracking options, according to a blog post by Curt Larson, VP of product at native ad-tech firm Sharethrough and co-chair of the OpenRTB Native Subgroup. The enhanced spec expands on the original 1.0 release, and the 1.1 version, which added new context fields and standardized asset types.

Larson writes that previously, only DCO companies that were also the bidder, were enabled in prior versions of the native spec. “The addition of support in 1.2 opens up a compelling new use case for native, and we expect to see rapid adoption by DCO companies and their clients.”

Byron Ellis, CTO at Spongecell, commented that the introduction of a third-party ad-serving specification for OpenRTB Native will help meet customers’ needs, allowing them to extend to native formats that they expect from a dynamic creative platform.

Support for privacy flags enables sellers and buyers to indicate who has included privacy notices in the ad placement. And event tracking enables  supply sources to express which events they can track. Also, demand sources can request those events to be tracked in a structured way beyond the impression, including viewability events.