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Making inventory available in Open Auction mode allows Publishers to tap into demand from self-service buyer strategies. Open Auction requires no prior deal setup, which offers flexibility for buyers and simplifies campaign activation.
This flexibility proves particularly important as evolving market shifts continue to shrink buying windows, a trend aligning with other media channels. Enabling Open Real-Time Bidding ensures Publishers capture incremental demand as buyers increasingly integrate OOH advertising into their omni-channel media plans.
In addition, Place Exchange has built inventory packages that allow buyers to target based on popular venue and asset categories. Enabling inventory for Open Auction automatically makes the inventory eligible to access demand through this mechanism.
Although on-demand buying remains relatively new to the OOH industry, adoption continues to grow. This flexible purchasing method works best with standardized inventory. Programmatic buyers access openly available inventory using standard targeting parameters, including site lists, locations, venue categories, and formats.
Buyers find inventory featuring high availability for specific targeting criteria most attractive for on-demand purchasing. Conversely, non-standard ad units present purchasing challenges on the open exchange and generally attract less incremental spend.
To enable Open Auctions, set the private_auction parameter to "0" in your requests. If the request includes deal objects, the system applies standard prioritization rules and includes an Open Auction as the secondary auction. If the request lacks deal objects, the system runs an Open Auction as the primary auction.
Notes:
- Not all DSPs integrated with Place Exchange enable Open Auctions for DOOH inventory. To learn which DSPs support this feature and understand their specific capabilities, contact your partnerships manager.
- Open Auction bid responses with an unapproved creative and with a bid value higher than the floor will generate approval requests through the Publisher Portal in the same manner as creatives responding to deals.
Best Practices
When the Publisher has selected inventory best suited for Open Auction, we recommend a few guidelines that can maximize the benefits of this buying mode:
- Consistent availability – Buyers typically use DSP planning tools while evaluating openly available inventory. DSP planning and forecasting tools rely on historical avails data, which requires indicating availability consistently over a few months in order to start seeing spend. This also helps dispel any buyer perception of OOH supply being limited for on-demand buying.
- Timely ad approvals – Approving ads in a timely manner serves well in all scenarios, but is particularly beneficial for Open Auction since a win can ensure that the buyer continues bidding on the same strategy.
- Standard formats – Standard OOH formats are best suited for the Open Exchange. In addition, Place Exchange supports IAB sizes with creative templates. Although this is not necessary to enable Open Auction, it is expected to reduce friction for buyers to activate campaigns in omni-channel DSPs. Regardless of the approach taken, we recommend selecting inventory with standard formats while enabling Open Auction.
Note: A preferred format size will be passed along to buyers, in addition to other supported formats. By default, the slot size will be used as the preferred size.
Due to the maturity of Programmatic DOOH and DSP support for self-serve buying, there is a lead-time from when inventory is activated in Open Auction to when Publishers see revenue. This is an incremental revenue source that expands options for Publishers but cannot be treated as a key revenue driver yet.
Note: DSPs need to start seeing consistent Open Auction availability that applies to your targeting criteria, and from there on it is subject to the factors mentioned above.
We recommend exploring these aspects while evaluating the success of Open Auction as a buying mode.
By applying these best practices, Publishers can flexibly configure Place Exchange inventory to align specific networks and units with Open Auction buying. In addition to the unique capabilities of Place Exchange such as measurement and 3rd Party Ad Serving, Place Exchange's Open Auction implementation supports true programmatic Open RTB, unlike some of the other leading SSPs.
A few highlights are:
- Transparency – Place Exchange provides full transparency to buying platforms on the Publisher and location information on openly available inventory.
- Creative Review – Our creative review process adheres to the same standards as PMP and PG campaigns. Publishers have full control over approving a creative for Open Auction, and can manage that at a network level.
- Flexibility – Publishers can set up their network and adunits to support Open Auction depending on availability, standardization of formats, and how the Publisher usually packages it.
- Control over pricing – We provide Publishers full control over how they price their inventory, and support the general sentiment that Open Auction should not devalue Publisher inventory. At the same time, setting bid floors at a level that is attractive to Open Auction buyers maximizes opportunities. In addition, Place Exchange allows different floors for video, so Publishers can price premium media-types appropriately.
- Reporting – Spend generated from Open Auction buying will show up in Portal reporting views along with PMPs and PG spend. Publishers have the ability to look at this data and understand DSPs and spend patterns to gain insights into where this is working successfully. Soon, publishers will be able to observe this across advertisers (a-domains) making use of this as well.
Refer to Enabling Inventory for Open Auction in the Portal to see how Publishers can enable Open Auction.
