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Industry Leaders Team to Drive New Open RTB Standards

Top DSPs and SSPs Form 'OpenRTB' Consortium

Technology leaders representing both the demand and supply sides of the digital advertising ecosystem have teamed to form a unique consortium aimed at improving real-time bidding (RTB) through the creation of open industry standards.

The newly minted group, called OpenRTB, summons perspectives and solutions from DSPs DataXu, MediaMath and Turn, and SSPs AdMeld, PubMatic and the Rubicon Project. The six companies lend their respective strengths to developing new open standards that will drive greater flexibility and consistency for advertisers and publishers, in turn, fueling the growth of digital advertising.

"Agreeing on a set of standards will enable all of us to streamline the real-time media buying process and create a stronger foundation on which to build future industry innovations," noted Bill Simmons, chief technology officer at DataXu. "It's critical that we join to overcome these common technical challenges if as a group we wish to see the industry realize its full potential of delivering superior marketing results to agencies and brands."

OpenRTB's initial mission is to standardize a protocol for solving one of the most error-prone and time, cost and labor-intensive processes to date -- managing publisher and advertiser blocklists.

The initial OpenRTB protocol and includes:

• DSP to SSP Advertiser Batch Synchronization: a method for automatically retrieving a list of publisher restrictions for each advertiser
• SSP to DSP Publisher Batch Synchronization: a method for automatically retrieving publisher properties and creative restrictions for each DSP
• RTB request standards for publisher creative restrictions

Milestones, participants' quotes and blog posts will be available on the OpenRTB website at http://openrtb.info, which also directs users to the OpenRTB code located at http://code.google.com/p/openrtb/. Future OpenRTB initiatives include additional API standards, integration of video ad controls, mobile ad controls, best practices for network management, creative labels, standardized bid request formats and performance reporting.

Concluded Simmons, "OpenRTB is the first truly collaborative digital advertising industry consortium that addresses current and future issues for all the players in the value chain by enlisting input from the people who know those issues most intimately."

Companies or individuals interested in OpenRTB should contact Bill Simmons at OpenRTB@dataxu.com.