DADS Real-time Bidding (RTB)

“The real-time bidding (RTB), aka programmatic buying, has recently become the fastest growing area in online advertising. Instead of bulk buying and inventory centric buying, RTB mimics stock exchanges and utilises computer algorithms to automatically buy and sell ads in real-time; It uses per impression context and targets the ads to specific people based on data about them, and hence dramatically increases the effectiveness of display advertising.”

To expand the market, DADS also uses OpenRTB to connect other partners within a process. “The mission of OpenRTB is to spur growth in Real-Time Bidding (RTB) marketplaces by providing open industry standards for communication between buyers of advertising and sellers of publisher inventory. There are several aspects to these standards including but not limited to the actual real-time bidding protocol, information taxonomies, offline configuration synchronization, and many more.

Figure 4: Reference model – request sequence

The following figure illustrates the OpenRTB interactions between an exchange and its bidders. Ad requests originate at publisher sites or applications. For each inbound ad request, bid requests are broadcast to bidders, responses are evaluated under prevailing auction rules, and a winner is selected. The winning bidder is notified of the auction win via a win notice. Ad markup can either be included in the bid prospectively or in response to the win notice. A separate billing notice is also available to accommodate varying policies enacted by exchanges which are beyond the scope of the OpenRTB specification (e.g., billing on device delivery, viewability, etc.). The win notice informs the bidder’s pricing algorithms of a success, whereas the billing notice indicates that spend should actually be applied. A loss notification is also available to inform the bidder of the reason their bid did not win.

The URLs for win, billing, and loss notices and the ad markup itself can contain any of several standard macros that enable the exchange to communicate critical data to the bidder (e.g., clearing price).