LONDON, UK — Incremental software releases aren’t always considered the sexiest. But, for CTV, a 0.1 bump could be big news.

That is according to one man who runs one of the main ad servers for connected TV.

In this video interview with Beet.TV’s Jon Watts at Beet.TV’s London summit in December, James Wilhite, Head of Product, Publica, explains why OpenRTB 2.6 is so important.

Incremental step-change

OpenRTB is the IAB’s protocol enabling real-time programmatic ad bidding. This year, it got a bump up from version 2.5 to 2.6.

That might not sound like a lot. But, to Wilhite and to CTV specifically, the changes are “really important”. Besides being backwards-compatible, he sees two main enhancements:

1. Podded requests

“You’re shrinking an ad break … from one request per ad to one request per ad break. You’re making it so that the entire ecosystem is smarter and more efficient, and that’s also going to help with competitive (ad) separation. Podded requests are huge.”

2. CPM per second

“A lot of desktop and mobile publishers talk to you about ‘maximising CPMs’. It’s not the same thing when you talk about video because you’re selling airtime. So the CPM per second is a much better thing to use because you’re looking at $15 for 15 seconds versus $15 for 60 seconds. That type of optimization isn’t there right now with (OpenRTB) 2.5.”

Decoupling the household

Those upgrades bring greater granularity and control to the whole CTV advertising process.

But they don’t represent the end state for CTV ad product development.

Although one of CTV’s big promises is to understand exactly who is watching an ad, Publica’s Wilhite acknowledges it is not always so straightforward.

“A household will generally have one to maybe three televisions – it’s difficult to know who’s watching at the time,” he says. “We’re working with partners like Comscore and Nielsen who are decoupling the household.

“They already know who lives there and, based on the content that’s being watched, they’re able to tell the ad server who it is, with a certain probability, that’s watching that content.”

Identity security

Publica employs server-side ad insertion, as opposed to playing out ads from client devices themselves.

Publica was acquired by IAS in 2021, just as many publishers and advertisers were fretting over lost identity signals from deprecation of cookies and mobile device identifiers.

But Wilhite thinks CTV is sitting pretty.

“Connected televisions don’t have cookies,” he says. “We have IFAs, identifiers for advertisers. We don’t see that same problem. We don’t have that deprecation … we we’re not seeing that at all. I see 95% coverage where I’m at right now, it doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon.”

You’re watching ‘Looking Ahead: TV in Europe 2025’ a Beet.TV Leadership Summit presented by Magnite & Publica, in partnership with egta. All videos were filmed on-site at our event at London’s Soho Hotel. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.