Pod Bidding Explained

It’s been over four years since the official introduction of pod bidding into the OpenRTB specification, and it’s finally gaining some steam in adoption. As more platforms adopt pod bidding, I thought it would be a good time to review the concept.

What is pod bidding?

First introduced in OpenRTB 2.6, pod bidding is an umbrella term that represents a collection of new fields in ORTB that allow platforms generating bid requests to offer an entire video ad pod in a single bid request in a standard way. It also defines structures that allow bidders to respond with multiple bids for a single pod.

What are the benefits of pod bidding?

While pod bidding unlocks other features not discussed here, I see two immediate benefits: QPS reduction and competitive separation.

Video supply platforms often use the inefficient method of sending individual bid requests for each slot in a pod. For an ad break with five slots available, that would translate to five individual bid requests. This creates issues on multiple fronts.

First, it creates unnecessary queries per second (QPS) for DSPs to process by expanding a single pod into multiple bid requests. Second, it blinds bidders to the fact that they could be submitting bids into the same pod to run alongside one another.

As QPS increases, so do bidders' infrastructure costs. While this is a manageable nuisance for some DSPs, it can sometimes act as a point of failure under times of immense strain such as marquee live sports events.

DSPs can buckle under the onslaught of traffic thrown their way — leading to no bids, pacing issues, or other problems that degrade monetization or user experience (such as dreaded slate manifesting as “We’ll be right back!” placeholders).

Bidding on the same pod also creates unnecessary waste, as DSPs submit conflicting bids that the supply platform must discard when constructing the pod. If a DSP doesn’t know they are sending some of their bids into the same pod, they have no opportunity to deduplicate or competitively separate submitted bids.

DSPs could be submitting two Geico ads or a Geico ad and a State Farm ad. Some of these conflicting ads would have no chance of ever delivering since publishers often have default rules that prevent creative from the same advertiser or advertising category from running in a single pod.

Some platforms could get around this before the introduction of pod bidding by offering multiple impression objects in a bid request. But this approach is not universally accepted, and pod bidding establishes a standard.

To recap, pod bidding offers a more flexible system that encourages sending a single bid request for an entire pod, drastically reducing the number of bid requests sent to a DSP. It also signals that this is a pod opportunity, and provides details, so demand platforms can submit multiple bids for the same pod.

The net result is lower QPS and allowing a DSP to deduplicate and competitively separate bids before handing them back to the SSP — drastically increasing the odds that a given bid will win since it won’t conflict with the DSP's own bids.

There are additional benefits to pod bidding that are outside the scope of this article. Things like mincpmpersec (minimum CPM per second) or slotinpod (the position of an ad slot within a pod) allow more flexibility in how publishers sell airtime and individual slot positions, or how DSPs can decide to fill pods. But in my discussions with peers and platforms, these concepts have not caught on yet.

How does pod bidding work?

There are three main fields you need to understand to grasp pod bidding:

1. Poddur: Pod duration. Indicates the total amount of time in seconds that advertisers may fill for a “dynamic” video ad pod.

2. Pod ID: Unique identifier indicating that an impression opportunity belongs to a video ad pod.

3. Maxseq: Indicates the maximum number of ads that may be served into a “dynamic” video ad pod.

A quick note on dynamic vs. structured pods. Dynamic pods are the cool new thing pod bidding enables by defining the total pod length, rather than structured pods that define each slot.

Structured pod bid requests could still enable the QPS reduction and competitive separation benefits above, but offer less flexibility in terms of how many ads a DSP can return (they can return less than or equal to max seq for dynamic but cannot exceed the number of slots for structured).

Here is what programmatically monetizing an ad pod with five slots could look like before pod bidding:

Each slot generates its own individual bid request.

And here is what it could look like with pod bidding (dynamic):

A single bid request could represent up to 10 individual opportunities for an ad to be delivered. This creates a 5x reduction in QPS relative to the prior state.

The bid request for this example would have an impression object that contains the following fields and values:

{

"imp": [{

"id": "1",

"video": {

"podid": "pod1234",

"mimes": [

"video/mp4",

],

"linearity": 1,

"maxduration": 60,

"minduration": 15,

"maxseq": 10,

"poddur": 150,

},

"bidfloor": 27,

"bidfloorcur": "USD",

}],

A DSP receiving this object within a bid request would know:

1. They are bidding on a 150-second pod.

2. They can submit creatives that are 15 seconds or longer or 60 seconds or shorter.

3. They can submit up to 10 individual creatives (e.g., ten 15s creatives, five 30s creatives, six 15s creatives + two 30s creatives, etc.)

So the DSP has the flexibility to return its preferred mix of creatives with durations that can fill up the entire pod. This in no way guarantees that the DSP will claim the whole pod or even a good portion of it, but it is possible.

The DSP also knows all these bids are for the same pod, so to maximize its chance of winning, it needs to competitively separate and deduplicate creatives in its bid response.

Before pod bidding, DSPs could have no idea they were bidding in the same pod:

The SSP would have to kick out bid responses that contain duplicate advertisers or matching categories. In the example above, Honda is ejected for being a duplicate advertiser, and Geico and Ford are kicked out because the pod already contains an insurance ad and an auto ad.

After pod bidding, DSPs can ensure they only respond with deduplicated and competitively separated bids:

SSPs could still pick and choose which of these bids they want to use among direct-sold ads and bids from other programmatic demand sources, but at least any given DSP won’t be competing against itself and limiting its ability to win.

What’s next with pod bidding?

Many major DSPs still do not support pod bidding. But as more DSPs adopt, and publishers and platforms reap the benefits, I expect the pressure to rise on all DSPs bidding on streaming video to adopt the standard eventually.

Not only could it lower infrastructure costs, but it could also lead to smoother delivery in live environments and higher win rates overall for DSPs.

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