In plain words, ad pod bidding refers to the functionality in CTV advertising, which enables to auction ad slots in publishers’ ad pods to a variety of Demand partners simultaneously, while ensuring the deduplication of video ad creatives in a pod.
Challenges with Ad Pod Bidding
Even though the notion of an ad pod, which refers to a sequence of ads, run back-to-back within a CTV stream, isn’t new, the capability to run auctions for video ad display in a pod implies a number of challenges for programmatic video advertising tech.
Among these:
- ability to place bids for a specific ad position within the ad pod (e.g. bidding exclusively for the first creative, or several sequential creatives, for instance);
- ability to bid for video ads of different duration within the ad pod (e.g. bidding for a 7-second and/or 10-second video ad within a 15-second ad pod, or else), and more.
Potential Solutions
The good news is, the mentioned challenges are likely to be resolved in the near future, mostly due to the released update to the IAB Tech Lab’s OpenRTB standard.
Namely, the OpenRTB 2.6 iteration enables businesses on the Demand side to include multiple video ad requests in a single bid request and introduces the concepts of structured, dynamic and hybrid ad pods with specific functionalities.
In particular, while structured ad pods imply the inclusion of a particular number of video ad creatives of a fixed duration, dynamic pods offer more flexibility in this respect, allowing the insertion of shorter, or longer ads in a pod, whilst the overall ad pod duration remains unchanged.
As expected, the introduction of a standardized, yet rather flexible protocol to programmatic CTV advertising can resolve some of the common interoperability issues in this industry niche and, of course, help increase fill rate within ad pods, too.