Mumbai: IAB Tech Lab, the global authority on technical standards in digital advertising, has announced the launch of its Containerization Project, a transformative initiative designed to modernize the underlying infrastructure of programmatic advertising. By introducing container standards within the OpenRTB ecosystem, the project seeks to resolve long-standing challenges around scalability, efficiency, and system fragmentation — particularly in high-demand scenarios like live events.
The Containerization Project introduces a scalable framework for deploying programmatic infrastructure and is intended to serve as a long-term solution to inefficiencies at critical integration points within the ad tech stack.
“After more than a decade of incredible growth, the digital ad ecosystem has pushed the current framework upon which programmatic is built to its limits,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “The way ad tech is built today is complex and has the potential to introduce inefficiency at integration points. The Containerization Project is not about incremental change. While Open RTB isn’t going anywhere, we are taking a hard look at how programmatic architecture is deployed and the underlying protocols, such as HTTP/1.1, and proposing a more intentional, durable foundation to innovate the next generation of real-time bidding.”
The Tech Lab Containerization Project Working Group will spearhead the effort, laying out comprehensive guidelines covering network protocols, performance parameters, instrumentation and metrics, security requirements, and baseline image standards. The initiative will also introduce responsible data-handling protocols for specific use cases such as fraud detection, curation signaling, and bid enrichment.
“This gives engineers a shared technical foundation to build from,” said Meera Choudhury, Head of Product at Chalice AI. “By establishing clarity on what is required, we can build in a way that respects those boundaries.”
“Consistency across teams and partners is key,” added Leo Ramirez, Vice President of Engineering at Index Exchange. “The absence of shared technical expectations has been a challenge. This project starts to address that.”
By standardizing based on use cases, the project will enable supply-side platforms (SSPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), and other ecosystem participants to seamlessly integrate and switch real-time bidding services without compromising on speed or efficiency.
IAB Tech Lab is now inviting stakeholders across the advertising value chain—including publishers, platforms, buyers, and tech vendors—to join the initiative and contribute to the development of this new framework.
