A Protocol Buffers standard for OpenRTB

OpenRTB has resolved integration headaches and increased speed and scale of programmatic advertising. Up next: a standard Protocol Buffers representation, which we believe will support another boost in expediency of technical integrations for programmatic. The current OpenRTB specification uses JSON making it easy for humans to understand.

We needed to define attributes and ensure clarity of definitions to ensure implementers were speaking the same language. Now, computers need to read the OpenRTB spec: enter Protocol Buffers. With the current JSON, every technology stack needs to implement its own internal representation of OpenRTB: what fields exist, their types, what values those fields can have, and relations between those fields. This representation needs to be parsed from and serialized to JSON in order to communicate with other technology stacks.

The advertising technology ecosystem continues evolving to address privacy, measurement, and automation challenges facing the industry.

Every time ad tech advances and OpenRTB evolves, engineers across dozens of companies need to update representation, validation, parsing, and serialization code. A Protocol Buffers standard for OpenRTB seeks to resolve this.

Protocol Buffers can be read by computers and represented in code in an intuitive way, as well as handling validation, parsing, and serialization. While the markdown standard for OpenRTB remains the source of truth, everything in the standard is reproduced in Protocol Buffers in a way that is readable to both humans and machines. There are three reasons why this is important: The engineer reader may point out that another IAB Tech Lab repo for Protocol Buffers for OpenRTB has been around for several years. While true, that was maintained on a best-efforts basis, and it is now being deprecated.