Prebid's meteoric rise

James Brown, head of international at Magnite

Since its inception, Prebid’s growth has been exponential — fuelled by the need for transparent, open source standards in the marketplace. Originally founded to be the Open Source Header Bidding Consortium three years ago by AppNexus and Rubicon Project, it has swiftly become the home of the Open Source movement. While fragmentation and self- interest have long been major barriers to investment within the independent web, Prebid has now become the default vehicle to address these challenges.

The momentum around Prebid is evident in its numbers alone. Prebid now includes over 650 engineering contributors and over 75 members across the buy and sell side. Its members span the full spectrum of the programmatic landscape: holding companies, publishers, buyers, DSPs and exchanges. With 95% of publishers using Prebid.js for header bidding, it boasts more than 20,000 live implementations, over 650 engineering contributors, 250+ approved bid adapters, and 19 user ID modules.

This momentum has led to the development of open source solutions for header bidding and beyond, including products for Programmatic Guaranteed, video, and even lightweight SDKs for app developers. It’s also led to the evolution of managed solutions, such as Magnite’s Demand Manager, which gives publishers more flexibility and control with configuration UIs and real-time analytics, all built on top of Prebid.

Importantly, the collaboration of the Prebid community has not come at the expense of competition. In fact, never has the market been more competitive. Shared tools and standards have simply made independent companies more powerful and efficient — a rising tide lifting all boats.

Prebid on the vanguard of emerging formats

With the proliferation of screens across Europe, we all know more audiences are streaming content via over-the-top (OTT) devices and on mobile phones, leading to greater interest in connected TV (CTV) and Audio. 50% of CTV audiences in Europe are daily streamers, and 59% of buyers worldwide are increasing their CTV budgets this year. Meanwhile, according to a study by IAB Europe, 60% of EMEA marketers are looking to increase programmatic audio spend.

This interest in emerging formats is spurring the need for better standards and more transparent programmatic tools created specifically for OTT video environments. As Prebid is built and updated by industry members, the need for better tools in these buckets has been well anticipated. In response, Prebid’s CTV-OTT task force was created to extend Prebid’s video work to handle long-form video content. It will also focus on issues such as Unified Auctions, competitive separation, support for ad pods, and other key features. Meanwhile, with the continued evolution of Prebid Server, Prebid has “grown up” to be able to handle anything from digital-out-of-home (DOOH), to CTV, to Audio.

2021 will focus on identity

So where does this leave us as we near the exit of 2020 and the entrance of 2021? While collaboration has brought new standards and solutions to the programmatic industry, we continue to face collective challenges — with identity being front and centre. The impending death of the third-party cookie is well reported, privacy concerns continue to be top of mind, and we all know it is not an exaggeration to say that solving the ‘identity crisis’ is critical to the continued sustainability and growth of the independent web.

To be successful, we believe identity needs to be approached as a community-based asset instead of something individual companies utilise for competitive advantage. Here, tools such as Prebid’s SharedID module are taking strides to create privacy-first, open, transparent solutions. Without third-party data, signalling first-party data will become even more important while preserving publisher control. Prebid’s header bidding standard already gives publishers ownership over which standardised IDs are allowed on their pages — the next step will be allowing publishers to administer first-party identifiers in the wrapper and control which IDs are transmitted to which buyers.

As our thoughts begin to turn towards 2021 and we look for ways to improve our business performance, Prebid presents a unique opportunity to both drive our own businesses forward whilst also making our industry fit and sustainable for the future. With new resolutions and goodwill to all people about to be part of our seasonal focus, further embracing this spirit of collaboration feels like a good place to start a new year.

Prebid in action — Kakaku.com, Inc.

We’ve covered the positive impact that Prebid has already had on the industry, as well as some predictions on how the solution, as well as an increased focus on identity, will continue to shape ad tech in 2021. Here, we’ll outline how one publisher used Prebid via Magnite’s Demand Manager solution to gain greater business insights and enhance their operations.

Kakaku.com, Inc., a Japanese internet service company and operator of purchase support site Kakaku.com, and restaurant discovery and reservation site Tabelog, managed their programmatic demand via two different Prebid systems: one was a proprietary wrapper solution and the other was an outdated version of Prebid.