Tech Lab Guest Blog
Tim Harvey, Founder, Knitting Media
Published: September 19, 2024
Offline ‘Traditional’ and Online ‘Digital’ Media now supported in IAB Tech Lab Programmatic Direct standards
OpenDirect is the open programmatic guaranteed trading standard from the IAB Tech Lab that allows a media buyer to plan, buy, activate and report, both ‘Digital Hare’ and ‘Traditional Tortoise’ media directly from premium publishers whilst avoiding the need for excessive 3rd party ‘AdTech Rates’.
Premium traditional media channels such as Press, Print, Linear TV, Radio and printed Out-Of-Home billboards can now be discovered, planned, traded, activated and reported using a common data-driven trading standard.
Traditional media is just slower digital media (it just takes longer to update) and is the essential performance aid to win the race for both brand recognition and prime engagement.
The adoption of OpenDirect allows a media buyer to programmatically plan and deliver a guaranteed advertising campaign to the right people at the right time with the right media owner using an open trading method that works for ALL speeds of media activation.
Using the OpenDirect API, buyers can build one system that can access true omnichannel inventory from multiple publishers without custom integrations for each one.
The features supported in OpenDirect include:
- Searching managed product inventory and guaranteed deals
- Determining price and availability
- Applying targeting and frequency constraints
- Creating orders and adding lines
- Uploading creative and assigning creative rules to booking lines
- Reserving and booking inventory
- Proof of Posting/Play/Broadcast
The Trading of both online and offline premium inventory directly with Publishers & Media Owners avoids programmatic bidding fees, intermediary margins, kickbacks and delivery obfuscations that typically increase the cost of the media by up to 54%* for the buyer.
Instant Buying rather than Real Time Bidding
OpenRTB focuses on the real-time bidding (RTB) of digital inventory, whereas OpenDirect covers the wider planning, buying, activation, and delivery cycle for online digital and and offline traditional inventory.
OpenDirect and OpenRTB work perfectly alongside each other, sharing the same methods for deal activation, ad serving and dynamic content optimisation.
Indeed, if a campaign is based on activation to real time audience signals then RTB is absolutely worth the premium and intermediaries it depends upon.
However, with the majority of media spend being planned on pre-processed and validated audience data modelling, updated on a daily/weekly/monthly basis (e.g device data, transactions, journeys,) it makes sense to use a programmatic trading solution that can secure a much wider range of media inventory a hour/day/week/month in advance with better pricing and confidence.
If you know where your audience is going to be today, why wait until tomorrow to bid for it?
Introducing OpenDirect 2.1
OpenDirect 2.1 formally embraces product targeting for ‘real world media’ with added support for:
- Deal targeting as ‘frames that see audiences’, or ‘audiences that see frames’
- Investment as fixed, frame or CPT pricing
- Rules-based pacing of a campaign over a period of time, location, budget and audience distribution.
- Temporal delivery standards such as spot/break length, share of time
- Identification and transparency for third party inventory, audience, location and venue standards to support global media trading.
- Upsite/playout/posting/display statistics made available at account, order and orderline level.
This adds to the core OpenDirect features of:
- Flexible ‘Sales rule’ controlled discovery of Product/DealIDs and availability
- Dynamic pricing (for yield control)
- Fully automated or ‘deal to manual’ approval/price negotiation
- Content approval, and delivery targeting via the IAB TechLab AdCom standard
- Campaign activation in real-time/days/weeks/months depending on the actual media activation lead time.
The standard can be found here
Implementation
The key opportunity for implementing OpenDirect is that the Media Owner or Publisher invests in a trading API linked to a product/deal catalogue that protects their inventory and availability data.
The key benefit of this investment is that a Media Owner or Publisher then has a framework of process for their key sales rule, inventory, trading, fulfilment and reporting functions.
If this business automation foundation is not in place, a Media Owner or Publisher will be always relying on external third parties to enable these key business functions for any form of manual, automated or programmatic trading at scale.
Another benefit of trading directly is the transparency of campaign monitoring and delivery. OpenDirect enables the ‘as near to live possible’ publishing of the posting/playout/broadcast event giving a buyer unprecedented access to campaign performance metrics, and directly remedy any delivery issues.
Real World Adoption
IAB Tech Lab released the first version of OpenDirect in January 2015.
Originally developed by a working group of representatives from AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yieldex, and later expanded to include executives from Bionic Advertising Systems and MediaMath as well, the OpenDirect specification was brought to IAB and its Digital Advertising Automation Task Force to be part of the trade association’s existing automation efforts, to gain wider industry participation, and to drive adoption across the ecosystem
The global Out of Home Media market has a physical global inventory that is 80% traditional (paper/vinyl billboard) and 20% digital (LCD/LED), with 60% of the spend going to traditional formats. This makes it an ideal candidate for a programmatic guaranteed solution that supports both online and offline channels.
Since 2018, Out-Of-Home (OOH) Media owners and Publishers such as Global Media, ClearChannel International, and Intersection have implemented OpenDirect 1.x solutions in-house whereas other Media Owners such as have integrated solutions from Key Systems, VIOOH (JCDecaux), Mereo (Ocean) and LDSK (Alight) to enable their direct trading with buyers.
The adoption of OpenDirect is also in active development with other global OOH tech solution providers. Do ask for it by name!
On the buy side, Publicis, WPP, Omnicom and Dentsu actively plan and buy digital and traditional OOH campaigns with OpenDirect enabled media owners in the UK, delivering more of their client’s ad spend to the media, not the middlemen.
In Summary
OpenDirect is a ‘foundation’ rather than a ‘sticking plaster’ for the programmatic trading of both traditional and digital media.
For the Media Owner or Publisher it puts in place an integrated approach to inventory, sales rules, trading, fulfilment and reporting, that transforms both its automated and offline commercial operations. Without having this automation in place, programmatic will become problematic.
OpenDirect 2.1 formally brings the omnichannel benefits of both traditional offline and digital online media to the world of programmatic trading and can work alongside RTB trading where and when needed.
Buying Direct from a Media Owner also avoids significant SSP/DSP/Technology costs and delivery obfuscations that increase the cost of media by 54%*
Having been proven in the premium media channels of both display and out-of-home media, OpenDirect is now primed for adoption (and is indeed being evaluated) in the wider Linear TV, Radio and Press media channels.
*ISBA Second Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study in Partnership with PWC, 18 Jan 2023 (e.g. $6,400 of media will cost $10,000 to buy, an increase of 54%)