In February 2024, The Trade Desk (TTD) announced it was expanding its OpenPath direct-to-publisher supply connection to include CTV.
But not every CTV publisher is eager to dive into OpenPath without seeing what it can do on the display side first.
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) officially launched the solution last week, Marisa Crocker, VP of programmatic partnerships and strategy at WBD, told AdExchanger.
But for now, CTV is not part of the integration.
While WBD owns and operates many high-profile TV and CTV properties – including Max, discovery+, HGTV and CNN – it’s keeping its OpenPath launch centered on its online news properties, with a particular focus on driving demand for CNN’s display inventory, Crocker said.
A direct path to news
WBD’s interest in driving more buyer demand to CNN.com and other news sites won’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with the monetization challenges faced by news publishers. Brand safety solutions continue to steer advertisers away from hard news coverage of politics, war and other stories deemed by brands as unsuitable for advertising.
But WBD hopes the increased transparency that comes from direct access via OpenPath will spur more advertisers to buy CNN display ads, Crocker said.
Through OpenPath, buyers get better insights into ad quality and can more easily reach specific audience niches that CNN caters to, she said. Advertisers “might not be wanting to run on the homepage of CNN, but that doesn’t mean that audiences they’re tapping into in the business section, the travel section and the article pages are not relevant and highly engaged,” she said.
WBD is also eager to demonstrate that news audiences that are typically blocked by default on programmatic platforms can drive campaign performance, Crocker said. That insight could inspire more performance-minded advertisers to proactively seek news inventory, rather than allowing automated buying tools to block it.
Integration setup
WBD had previously integrated TTD’s identity solution, UID2, and worked closely with the DSP to sell some specific inventory, like its NCAA March Madness Live offering for college basketball coverage, Crocker said. So, when TTD approached WBD about OpenPath starting in 2023, the publisher was interested, even if it didn’t want to dive into the CTV side of things right away.
Adding OpenPath to WBD’s display advertising tech stack was easy enough, Crocker said. It integrates directly into the publisher’s Prebid adapter and essentially functions as header bidding software, she said. That setup also allows WBD to enable programmatic demand to compete alongside direct-sold demand.
WBD opted to create a direct OpenPath connection to its display ad server, Crocker said, which also happens to be The Trade Desk’s preferred mode of integration. WBD uses Google’s ad server for display inventory and FreeWheel as its ad server for all video inventory, including online video and CTV.
The direct connection to the ad server and Prebid wrapper integration gives buyers more confidence in what inventory they’re buying, since there are no intermediaries pooling WBD’s inventory with another publisher’s or modifying the data in the bid request, Crocker said.
There’s a speed advantage, too, she added. A direct connection to the ad server cuts down on latency, improving the user experience and monetization, since OpenPath bidders are more likely to submit a winning bid before the auction times out.
When buyers use OpenPath, they have more direct access to the bid requests coming from the publisher, Crocker said. The bid requests include added bid decoration that helps buyers specifically target certain audiences or inventory, she said. For example, this bid decoration could include UID2s that correlate to certain interest groups.
Buyers also get improved pricing transparency, she said. “They’re getting more direct access to the inventory, so it’s improving their cost efficiency, because they don’t know what SSPs are taking out on the sell side.”
On the WBD side, the publisher can see who’s bidding at what price, so Crocker and her team can more granularly control pricing strategies.
Not all publishers integrate with OpenPath in this exact way. Publishers have the flexibility to set up their auction flow how they prefer, said Will Doherty, SVP of inventory development at The Trade Desk, with one exception. OpenPath will not run through Google Open Bidding. (OpenPath demand can, however, compete with bids from SSPs in Google Open Bidding.)
An open path forward?
OpenPath’s early results have been encouraging, Crocker said. In a few weeks of testing prior to the full rollout, WBD saw higher fill rates and greater scale of demand coming from TTD, she said.
But it’s early days for the integration, and WBD would not fully commit at this time to bringing its CTV inventory to OpenPath.
“We’re really looking at this as test and learn to see how we perform,” Crocker said, “and then we’ll roll it out further from there.”
WBD sees OpenPath as part of its strategy to reduce supply paths to a few strategic partners. The group includes OpenPath, a direct-to-DSP connection, as well as SSPs, which traditionally have collected bids from The Trade Desk. WBD isn’t looking to cut SSPs out of its supply path entirely, Crocker said.
“We’re always looking at differentiation and diversity in demand across our entire stack,” she said. “This is just another funneling of demand that has direct access to our inventory.”
