By Kelvin Pichardo, Director, Product Marketing

Originally published on Adweek

Advertising technology is undergoing a change with the swift adoption of wrapper solutions to help publishers work with multiple header bidding solutions at once. This shift away from the old waterfall setup—where publishers could move their inventory from one market to another to optimize for revenue—has provided publishers with tools to help them regain control of ad decisioning, optimize revenue and improve yield, CPMs and performance.

As header bidding and wrapper solutions increasingly become central to publishers’ programmatic revenue, there’s been a call for more transparency and openness. Black-box environments present challenges to publishers trying to take back control of their inventory. Publishers must try to differentiate true monetization partners from point solutions.

The call for transparency and openness is driving a change in the ad tech landscape from closed- to open-source systems for three reasons:

1. Open-source increases publishers’ ability to be in control of ad decisioning. With open-source, publishers can see into the inner workings of how the technology and mechanisms operate. They are able to verify code more easily and adapt it to their benefit. Open-source brings many advantages for publishers as it returns choice, control, leverage and ownership of ad decisioning to them.

2. Open-source increases transparency which positively impacts fairness in programmatic. With code produced by a collective group of developers, including members of competing solutions, it factors out specific advantages to any single technology player, which means the real advantage goes to the publisher. This transparency also ensures fairness by allowing anyone in the ecosystem to easily verify the code. In contrast, proprietary solutions limit visibility and may not always be working to benefit publishers as verification of fairness is difficult, if not impossible.

3. Open-source projects like Prebid.org have industry momentum behind them.Prebid.org has become a de facto standard for the industry and an ecosystem of solutions is being built on top of it. Because it has broad industry support, there is faster innovation, allowing for a comprehensive set of well-tuned adapters, tools and related technologies. Publishers benefit from the depth and scale of an interoperable ecosystem while maintaining confidence that they are in control of ad decisioning.

A wrapper solution developed with open-source code will maintain flexibility and allow a publisher to customize as needed. Further, a solution that works across multiple formats is vital as digital marketing advances. PubMatic’s wrapper solution, OpenWrap, is an enterprise solution for Prebid.js and is the first open and fully supported hybrid client- and server-side wrapper solution, allowing publishers to future-enable their ad decisioning strategies and regain control of inventory.

Ultimately, operating outside of black-box environments will increase transparency in programmatic and keep publishers in control of their ad decisioning. As ad tech transforms, open technologies will enhance collaboration as we build the foundation of future advertising.