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We recently covered the efforts by the IAB Tech Lab to standardize retail media, which defies the idea of standards. This week, we take a look at an independent effort backed by programmatic commerce players that are trying to bring their own greater sense of urgency to the standardization process.
Kevel’s crew
You know that feeling when you’re stuck in highway traffic: the mix of being at once in a rush and unable to move?
Well, that’s what programmatic retail media feels like right now. It is stuck in a holding pattern until there are OpenRTB standards – the protocols for automated online advertising – that address sponsored listings.
Which is why a cadre of programmatic and retail media companies, helmed by retail ad tech startup Kevel, have formed a separate-but-cooperative independent working group to develop OpenRTB standards for retail media.
But isn’t that what the IAB does?
It is, and the IAB Tech Lab even published its first retail media standards proposal last month. But that document is a jumping off point, with a long review phase and product development to go before workable specs exist.
“We’re very much in line with the IAB Tech Lab,” Kevel founder and CEO James Avery told AdExchanger. “We just have a little more urgency to get this figured out.”
Outside standards
The new independent retail working group has strong programmatic depth.
Its real purpose is to bring hands-on programmatic to address the problem outside the IAB Tech Lab’s sphere, where matters of diplomacy matter more, since that’s where companies weigh in on what meets a standard or how attribution will be accredited.
It’s also common that the IAB might standardize a certain feature after it’s been used independently in market, Avery said. So this group can still put products to work as a precursor to formal standards.
The Trade Desk, PubMatic, InMobi, Criteo, CitrusAd and TripleLift are involved. As are several retail media sellers that operate ad tech businesses, including Instacart, Uber, Dunnhumby (a subsidiary of the British supermarket chain Tesco), Farfetch and Delivery Hero.
And while the new working group is outside the IAB, there are still delicate competition issues. Kevel, for instance, works as the main backer, but if it were a 400-pound gorilla – such as TTD, Criteo or Instacart – the group would become that company’s thing.
Also, to avoid any inevitable bias, the working group isn’t personally directed by Avery or another Kevel executive. Shamim Samadi, co-founder and former product chief at Beeswax, the DSP acquired by FreeWheel, is in charge.
The programmatic engineering depth is important because the point is to fit this new ad channel into the OpenRTB framework.
A great deal of information must be conveyed in the bidstream for sponsored listings to work with open programmatic. Both sides must share the same product catalog, inventory data (so you don’t sell a sold-out item), geographic info on where items can be shipped and how fast, live reviews, product descriptions and click-to-cart functionality.
Even to those in the trenches of programmatic retail media, it’s unclear whether these types of ads will require new OpenRTB fields of their own or might fit in as extensions of preexisting fields.
Companies like Criteo and CitrusAd possess all that information and use it to render creative through their own proprietary systems. An OpenRTB standard wouldn’t even really have creative; all those details and the imagery would instead be pulled in live from an API.
Which is to say, it’s complicated.
Why the urgency?
If standardization is such a struggle, and if the big players have proprietary systems that work, why the rush to create standards?
That’s why there hasn’t been movement in the past, according to Avery. But retail media standardization is happening now, he said, because the competitive dynamics and overall opportunity in the market have flipped.
For instance, programmatic sponsored listings already exist and have for many years. That’s what Criteo does, right?
But programmatic sponsored listings only exist within each company’s network.
Criteo runs open programmatic sponsored listings … of Criteo demand to Criteo supply. The same goes for CitrusAd, which is owned by Publicis, or the Microsoft retail media business PromoteIQ.
Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if Criteo demand could easily and programmatically target PromoteIQ’s supply or if TTD and Citrus demand bought Criteo supply?
After years of digging their own little pools, there’s now a rising tide that can lift the whole category, Avery said.
It isn’t all kumbaya, though.
Avery was listening to TTD CEO Jeff Green on a recent earnings report tell investors he believes most promoted listings will someday go through TTD.
Kevel would disagree, as might every other partner in the independent retail media working group.
But it won’t happen at all if there isn’t an open standard that switches retail ad networks to true open programmatic supply.
