In December 2024, the IAB Tech Lab released for Public Comment a new extension to the OpenRTB specification. This release has been finalized as of January 24, 2025. These changes are intended to facilitate the standardization of programmatic media buying, specifically for onsite product listing ads (PLAs). PLAs are endemic brands to the retailer or ecommerce platform and generally refer to ad slots which display paid results with the exact same look and feel that non-sponsored products are listed but contain a callout that the inventory was paid for, most of the time with a word like ‘sponsored’ or ‘advertisement’ somewhere in the slot. They rely on the bidder having some information about items in a product feed and the creatives are rendered by the website or app owners stack. .
Bidding on Product Listing Ads differs from traditional digital ad placements in that the creative assets are provided and rendered by the app or site owner. In many cases, the buyer only needs to provide a product ID in the ad response to signal the product to be advertised.
Changes to OpenRTB for Commerce Media
The most critical component to running a successful auction for a Product Listing Ad is understanding a product feed. A community extension has been published that introduces the prodfeed object (bidrequest.ext.prodfeed). The presence of this object signals that understanding aproduct feed is required to successfully transact on the impression. It includes information about the feed itself, allowed products and categories, and blocked products and categories.
It should be noted that this release does not attempt to specify the structure of a product feed; however, the working group may provide guidance around information that needs to be contained in a feed in the future.
Changes to the Native Ads API 1.2
The Native Ads API is a complimentary protocol to OpenRTB that has information about creatives that get rendered well…natively to the inventory where they show up. The Native protocol is less about delivering a finished creative and more about telling the publisher what assets to use to put together a creative that matches their site’s look and feel.
Bidding on PLAs (Product Listing Ads) differs from most ad placements in that the creative assets are provided by the publisher. The buyer needs only to provide a product ID to signal the product to be displayed. A new data type has been added to the Native spec, data type ’13’ (Product ID), to signal that the information necessary to render the ad is contained in a product feed..
This gives a clear, high level signal that special treatment of the request is required, and may help future proof creative use cases beyond the native spec (for example audio creative in a grocery store limited to the allowed products).
While the Native Ads Specification already contains a ton of pertinent information about the inventory, we are proposing an addition to the part of the Native ad response that signals that the onus is on the store owner to compile the ad asset with information from their product feed such as the brand name, product description, rating, and price.
What’s Next?
While this release is focused on Product Listing Ads, it forms the foundation for future commerce media use cases. Commerce Media is the fastest growing sector of digital advertising, yet it lacks implementation of some of the most fundamental industry standards that have propelled the rest of the ecosystem forward. This release is the first step of many more to come that will create efficiency in the commerce media supply chain as it continues to grow.
The Sub-Working Group focused on supporting Commerce Media use cases will continue to tweak Tech Lab standards aimed at giving buyers and sellers the signals they need to run successful programmatic auctions on digital ecommerce properties
Chris Coupland
Platform Operations Director
Basis Technologies