IAB Tech Lab, the global authority on technical standards in digital advertising, today announced the launch of its Containerization Project, a groundbreaking initiative poised to fundamentally modernize the infrastructure of programmatic advertising. By introducing container standards within the existing OpenRTB ecosystem, this transformative project aims to tackle persistent industry challenges related to scalability, efficiency, and system fragmentation, particularly under high-demand conditions like live events.
The Containerization Project introduces a scalable framework for deploying programmatic infrastructure, designed as a long-term solution to address 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 isn’t about incremental change. While OpenRTB 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 initiative will be spearheaded by the newly formed Tech Lab Containerization Project Working Group. This group will develop comprehensive guidelines encompassing network protocols, performance parameters, instrumentation and metrics, security requirements, and baseline image standards. A key focus will also be the introduction of responsible data-handling protocols for specific use cases, including fraud detection, curation signaling, and bid enrichment.
Industry leaders are already endorsing the project’s potential impact. Meera Choudhury, Head of Product at Chalice AI, commented, “This gives engineers a shared technical foundation to build from. By establishing clarity on what is required, we can build in a way that respects those boundaries.” Leo Ramirez, Vice President of Engineering at Index Exchange, added, “Consistency across teams and partners is key. The absence of shared technical expectations has been a challenge. This project starts to address that.”
By standardizing based on use cases, the Containerization Project will enable seamless integration and switching of real-time bidding services for supply-side platforms (SSPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), and other ecosystem participants, without compromising on speed or efficiency.
IAB Tech Lab is now actively inviting stakeholders across the entire advertising value chain—including publishers, platforms, buyers, and tech vendors—to join this critical initiative and contribute to the development of this new, foundational framework for programmatic advertising.
