A year on, The Trade Desk’s Open Path is moving toward its goals, but challenges persist

By Seb Joseph

It was during the first week of January when a senior exec from The Trade Desk asked publishers and ad tech vendors in a private WhatsApp group to abide by Chatham House Rules — nothing attributed by name, title or company. They wanted to be candid with everyone there.

What followed was their own 291-word defense of OpenPath, the ad tech vendor’s plan to let advertisers bid directly on publisher inventory without the typical involvement of supply-side platforms (SSPs). The Trade Desk exec knew all too well that their peers weren’t entirely convinced. Publishers worried OpenPath would suck money out of the market. SSPs suspected this would put pressure on their margins at best, and disintermediate them at worst. The exec wanted to address these concerns.

The defense tried to assure their audience that OpenPath isn’t an SSP in disguise. They insisted it wouldn’t undermine existing deals between publishers and other SSPs. They even suggested that OpenPath could make publishers more money.

“It’s not an SSP, it’s a direct integration to pubs alongside SSPs,” said the exec in the group. “To echo a point above, SSPs aren’t just pipes, but OpenPath is.”

The rhetoric wanted to leave those publishers in no doubt that OpenPath would help solve their problems, not add to them. It’s debatable whether it had the desired effect.

One half of the OpenPath address was applauded by two thumbs up emojis, while the other had just one, according to a picture of the chat group taken shortly after the message was sent and shared with Digiday.

The message — and the varied, subsequent reaction to it — are a microcosm of OpenPath’s progress and The Trade Desk’s pitch to publishers, some of whom remain not entirely convinced.

Publishers are using it, to be clear. There are around 4,000 domains now actively selling impressions to advertisers through OpenPath, according to ad tech tracker Sincera. It’s not the sort of scale that would normally set pulses racing. Not when compared to the amount of domains sold by more traditional programmatic marketplaces (like PubMatic or Openx). However, OpenPath has no intention of achieving that scale.

“We’re really happy with the progress of OpenPath over the last year, during which time we’ve got to the point where we have a clean baseline for supply,” said Will Doherty, vp of inventory development at The Trade Desk. “We have a very short supply chain, between us and the publisher. And the telemetry that that has given us has been accretive across a number of dimensions.”

In layman’s terms, OpenPath is doing just fine. It’s now a way for marketers to buy programmatic ads directly from marquee brands like A+E Networks, Disney, Encyclopedia Britannica as well as from some of the most visited sites around via publisher holding companies like Cafe Media.

And there are more to come — over 3,500 in fact. That’s the number of publishers who have set up the OpenPath connections to The Trade Desk but have yet to see it …read more

Source:: Digiday