New Initiative Calls on Industry to Standardize Containerization Technology in Open RTB for Efficient and Scalable Ad Tech Deployment

IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standards-setting body, announced the launch of its Containerization Project. The initiative addresses emerging challenges in the development and maintenance of programmatic infrastructure. Specialized bid enrichment and evaluation partners, mounting scaling challenges, especially for live events, fragmented systems, and uneven performance, have made the current foundation difficult to evolve. The standardization of Container technology for Open RTB aims to help the industry develop a more scalable, efficient, and sustainable programmatic ecosystem.

“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 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.”

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The Tech Lab Containerization Project Working Group is responsible for leading this effort. The initial scope includes guidance on supported network protocols, instrumentation and metrics, baseline image standards, performance parameters, and security requirements. The initiative introduces guidelines for responsible data handling within containers for specific use cases, such as bid request/response enrichment, curation signaling, and fraud detection workflows. Standardization based on use cases will enable programmatic supply chain participants, such as SSPs and DSPs, to add and swap real-time bidding services partners without compromising efficiency and latency.

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“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,” said 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.”

IAB Tech Lab is calling on companies across the ecosystem — including publishers, platforms, buyers, and technology providers — to participate in the ongoing development of the framework.