On September 12th, Prebid hosted the ‘Prebid Digital Out-of-Home’ webinar to introduce the newest addition to our product lineup: Prebid DOOH. After almost 2 years of development, Prebid DOOH is now live and ready for the market. The webinar covered the achievements of the DOOH Taskforce and shared their roadmap for the future. If you missed it, we’ve got you covered with a summary in this article, and you can watch the full recording here.
DOOH Taskforce Introduction
Mina Naguib (CTO of Hivestack and Chair of Prebid DOOH Committee): Mina and his team at Hivestack have been working on Prebid DOOH since day 1.
Nitin Shriram (CTO of Intersection): Nitin played an important role in testing and validating the product.
If you are interested in joining the DOOH Taskforce to build a product that benefits the industry, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at membership@prebid.org.
Roadmap Recap
2022: Prebid and DOOH players started sharing ideas about developing Prebid’s DOOH product. Simultaneously, IAB was working on standardizing the DOOH transactions via oRTB (IAB standardizing OpenRTB version 2.6-202211).
2023: The taskforce updated Prebid Server to safely support DOOH transactions, building up the basics.
Q1 – Q3 2024: Hivestack contributed the very first piece of code, which is an adapter inside the Prebid Server. Everything was ready to be tested by Intersection.
Recent Lab Test
The objective was to run a test with a single pre-approved creative on one of Intersection’s test screens using Prebid Server for transactions. Hivestack set up Intersection as a publisher in their test environment and onboarded a single Intersection screen as a site. Intersection then hosted a Prebid Server with Hivestack’s adapter enabled and developed a “Prebid HTML wrapper creative” capable of requesting the Prebid Server to conduct an auction and process the results.
Lab Test Setup
Sample Request/Response
Test Screen
The example creative comes through the Prebid Server pipeline. It takes 15 seconds to go back to the loop, which is serviced by the ad server.
Learnings
The lab test revealed several key learnings. By implementing a Prebid adapter, DOOH-focused SSP platforms are well-positioned to support OOH media owners who want to host their own Prebid Server for easier integration. DOOH SSPs can leverage Prebid Server to enable a unified auction process, improving transparency in the bidding process. Additionally, Prebid Server reduces integration complexity between non-DOOH demand platforms and media owners, enhancing compatibility. What’s left to be done is addressing DOOH-specific requirements is essential for facilitating seamless transactions of DOOH inventory.
Intersection’s Next Steps
Next, Intersection aims to conduct a limited field test while prioritizing the operationalization of a production Prebid Server. Additionally, Intersection plans to support other partners interested in testing their adapters.
Roadmap Next Steps
It is worth emphasizing that the technology is working well, and now the taskforce want to focus on these topics:
- Ecosystem growth: making it feasible to add an SSP or adapter.
- Framework features:
- Standardized/singular inventory supply management:
- Impression Multipliers should be updated to the SSPs.
- Taxonomy & the declaration of the screen are to be moved into one single source of truth that is relayed and respected by all parties.
- Ecosystem-wide creative approval processes could be done with the help of DOOH players.
Getting Involved
As always, Prebid encourages industry players to join our Taskforces and build the products with us. This is what Prebid is all about – an open source product built by the market for the market.
SSPs & Bidders:
- Get involved in shaping the future of programmatic DOOH: Join the Prebid DOOH Taskforce
- DOOH Specialists: Add your new adapter to prebid-server
- Existing adapters: Update to declare support for DOOH inventory
Technology Platforms / DOOH Media Owners:
- Tap new demand sources using Prebid Server
- Ask your favourite DOOH SSPs for PreBid support
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out or ask on our GitHub as well.
Q&A
- Do you have documentation for the changes needed to make DOOH work on an existing adapter?
A – Yes, there is documentation on how to declare that an adapter supports DOOH. You can use Hivestack’s implementation as a reference. You can also reach out to Mina!
- With Prebid Server being the source of truth for multipliers and venue types, don’t media owners still need to set up their inventory across all SSPs they wish to monetise across?
A – Traditionally and currently, for DOOH, media owners, who own a screen, have to sign with the SSPs and declare to the SSPs each and every ad unit, attribution, impression multiplier, etc. Hopefully, this will be streamlined into the bid stream.
Worth mentioning that some SSPs don’t have the capability to accept videos on the bid requests, and some require the requests to be preregistered.
- What % of media owners (DOOH pubs) are keen to get onboard with the Prebid Server?
A – We have seen media owners selling their inventories using multiple SSPs by selling loop #1 to SSP 1, loop #2 to SSP 2, etc, which essentially means they are time splitting their inventories. The current solution to this is to build proprietary systems. This means using Prebid could actually help reduce reliance on those systems while still being able to connect with multiple SSPs.
- Is there a particular reason why it was done server side? Does it even make sense to think about client side prebid for DOOH?
A – You could go client-side but there must be a lot of standardisation, which doesn’t exist now.
- Any reporting available?
A – Currently, there is built-in reporting feature in Prebid Server.
Recap Provided By: Thuy Ho (Relevant Digital)