OpenRTB has arrived. The announcement was supposed to happen today. But an itchy fingered Ed Lee at AdAge couldn’t contain his excitement and published a confusing post (which has been subsequently amended) over the weekend suggesting that the six participating companies behind OpenRTB were forming a common exchange. Cue lots of back peddling and several weekend emails outlining that was not the case. So what is OpenRTB? Bill Simmons, CTO at Dataxu, does a Q&A with John Ebbert this morning explaining the initiative in more detail. He outlines the main benefits as being:

- Higher CPMs for publishers, since bidders will have accurate pre-filters
- More accurate and cost efficient bidding for buyers
- Better enforcement of publisher and advertiser restrictions, due to a common way of specifying them
- Easier integration of DSPs with SSPs, since one you have set up OpenRTB once, the cost of setting up a new connection is trivial

These are great intentions – and should be welcomed by the industry. But the reality is if this group wants to stop Google dominating the RTB universe and dictating the agenda they’ll want to get some bigger players on board. I’m sure they could find favour in companies like AppNexus (recently shafted by Google over access to Adx), Yahoo, Microsoft and OpenX. Now is the time to get these guys on board – before the big G looks to introduce its own standards. And will Invite and Adx join this group? The magic RTB eight ball says: Google will be giving its standard two finger salute to OpeRTB. There’s more on all this on the OpenRTB site.