• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 71 minutes ago

“OpenAds,” launched by The Trade Desk on Thursday, is described by the company as sort of a prebid wrapper designed to give ad buyers direct access to ad impressions from publishers. 

There will be one type of service for large publishers and another type for small publishers -- both intended to improve transparency for advertisers that use The Trade Desk's “OpenPath” product, a supply Path Optimization (SPO) solution.

The Trade Desk frames its initiatives, like OpenAds, as a way to combat market opaqueness and put more of the ad dollar into the hands of publishers. The platform was developed in response to a change in the prebid open-source software that altered how transaction IDs were generated, affecting the ability to track ad impressions across platforms.

“OpenPath is the connection to fair auctions,” Jeff Green, founder of The Trade Desk, wrote in a blog post on Thursday, also describing it as a "transparent auction."

OpenAds will come in two versions. The first is designed for use by large sellers and publishers such as a server-to-server enterprise solution.

The second is designed for use by smaller publishers that want an easier implementation. 

The combination of OpenPath and OpenAds will become available to all OpenPath enterprise partners in October. The simplified version for smaller publishers will become available in the coming months, Green said.

The Trade Desk will open source the underlying auction code to allow anyone to inspect the mechanics of the OpenAds auction.

Other companies will have the opportunity to bid into OpenAds with controls and technology that ensure demand is provably direct and transparent. A discussion on Reddit suggests that "other" companies includes demand- and supply-side companies.

Green said The Trade Desk is not “getting into yield management or the supply side of ad tech,” but rather decided to give “data to sellers and publishers and some resellers so they can do yield management. It is possible that more yield management will be done in the future via API rather than managing uniquely modified auctions or QPS.”

Green seems to be more open to giving or sharing data since Google was asked to do so by the judge as a remedy in its monopoly trial earlier this year.

The Trade Desk also will transition from a manual, time-consuming process for giving feedback to publishers into an automated, scalable system called PubDesk,” a product developed for publishers to help them understand advertiser demand and improve their ad revenue.

The name is a play on "trading desk," but is directed at publishers rather than advertisers.