Extended Content Identifiers in OpenRTB open for Public Comment until April 10, 2025
One of the hallmarks of linear TV advertising is the ability for marketers to insert their creative messaging adjacent to the series, movies, or events of their choosing. It allows marketers to ensure their message benefits from the halo effect of proximity to premium content and provides comfort around the brand suitability of that content.
While buying ads on linear broadcast TV is the traditional and most familiar approach for creating brand awareness among the top marketers, streaming TV has quickly become a must-buy. Streaming TV grew to an estimated $30B market in 2024, whereas linear TV has declined from its peak to an estimated $60B market share. As viewers’ consumption behavior has moved towards streaming TV, programmatic advertising is an increasingly important dimension of monetization for content owners and distributors.
Programmatic advertising on streaming TV presents many benefits to both brand- and performance-oriented marketers, including incremental reach, efficiency, and improved measurement and attribution relative to linear TV. However, one dimension where streaming TV can meaningfully improve is by providing more information around the underlying series/episode, movie, or event that the viewer is consuming: the content.
Today, many OpenRTB bid requests contain data regarding the app bundle, channel, network, or genre of the content that the viewer is consuming, but these fields are often not as granular as buyers would like. On the other hand, sellers vary in their comfort with sharing show-level data but are generally eager to share helpful contextual signals with buyers.
In the Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group, many participants share the belief that programmatic advertising can better deliver on its potential to monetize streaming TV by providing buyers with more decisioning power and insight based on the underlying content in a way that doesn’t require the publisher to share a program name in plain text with the DSP.
Enter: Extended Content Identifiers (ECIDs). We have just submitted to Public Comment a proposal to include ECIDs in the `Content` object of OpenRTB 2.6.
ECIDs create a namespaced location for granular content-related metadata in the OpenRTB bid request. In other words, requests can include information, typically from a third-party data vendor that the publisher and/or SSP has contracted with, related to the underlying content the viewer is consuming. Generally, these IDs would correspond to specific series/episodes, movies, or events.
Implementers, including media owners and SSPs, can choose to disclose mappings of these IDs to the underlying content (episode, movie, or event titles). Alternatively, implementers can map from ECIDs to other targetable dimensions like moods, sentiments, or actors, without disclosing the underlying show-level data. This means that ECIDs can be used in a way that is consistent with a publisher’s approach to VPPA or other privacy-related legislation. ECIDs can even be used to pass encrypted envelopes that only specific recipients can open.
The flexibility of ECIDs is intended to enable new use cases while protecting publisher and consumer disclosure preferences.
As the era of non-addressable linear TV draws to a close and the era of addressable streaming TV unfolds, the importance of matching creative messaging with appropriate media remains. Extended Content IDs provide a framework for richer communication about that media, which Tech Lab Working Group members believe will help enable a more abundant programmatic marketplace for streaming TV.
If you haven’t yet, please join in the conversation by providing your thoughts during the Public Comment period for this proposal, which lasts until April 10, 2025.
P.S. The members of the Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group would like to thank the authors of the Extended Content IDs community extension, which served as the inspiration for the proposed updates, and which will be considered deprecated if and when this new ECIDs proposal is accepted and published.
Rob Hazan
VP of Product, Streaming TV
Index Exchange