Mumbai: IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standards-setting body, has released a proposed Protocol Buffers (protobuf) representation of the OpenRTB specification, aimed at reducing technical debt and enhancing interoperability across the programmatic advertising ecosystem. The proposed standard is now open for public comment until October 16, 2025.
The move seeks to streamline how OpenRTB attributes are structured and exchanged across the programmatic supply chain, replacing individually maintained mappings used by organizations today.
“We continue to hear from members that technical debt is slowing down innovation in the ecosystem,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. “Standardizing protobuf for RTB drives our Containerization Initiative, which is focused on creating a more efficient, scalable, and modular OpenRTB architecture. Protobuf brings speed, efficiency, and consistency to containerized architectures—offering a compact, language-agnostic way for microservices to communicate seamlessly across environments. In a world where containers scale rapidly and services spin up and down constantly. Protobuf ensures data exchange stays fast, reliable, and resource-efficient.”
The new protobuf standard introduces a unified structure for encoding OpenRTB objects, cutting integration time and maintenance overhead while boosting speed and sustainability. Initial benchmarks indicate Protocol Buffers can reduce data parsing time by up to 50 percent compared to JSON.
“Protocol Buffers are already used throughout the programmatic ecosystem, but without a standard to translate between JSON and Proto, some of the value in Protobuf gets lost,” said Hillary Slattery, Senior Director of Programmatic Product Management at IAB Tech Lab. “With this release, we’re removing the guesswork and custom development overhead. We’re inviting the industry to evaluate, test, and help refine it.”
Industry leaders welcomed the development, noting its potential to improve efficiency and drive innovation. “We have long invested in efforts that reduce friction and standardize integrations in programmatic supply chains,” said Trent Underwood, Engineer, Google. “A common Protocol Buffers standard across OpenRTB can help us focus our efforts on performance and innovation.”
“Moving toward industry standards for OpenRTB represents an important step to improved interoperability and reducing technical complexity across programmatic advertising,” added Neal Richter, Director, Amazon DSP. “Efficiency-driven enhancements are helpful for the entire industry to accelerate innovation and improve performance.”
The draft specification was developed by IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Supply Chain Commit Group and will be accompanied by a GitHub repository and technical blog post. Developers, platforms, publishers, and buyers are invited to review the proposed format and provide input to ensure its applicability across diverse use cases.
The public comment period is open until October 16, 2025.
