Digital advertising depends on trust: trust in what is being bought, where it appears, how it is measured, and how data is handled. At OpenX, we believe those expectations are best grounded in clear privacy standards and shared accountability, for without shared standards, the industry is effectively grading its own homework. That is why we support the IAB UK Gold Standard and the direction of its enhanced criteria.
The Gold Standard brings several of the industry’s most important safeguards into one framework. Its requirements address ad fraud through tools such as ads.txt, sellers.json, and the OpenRTB SupplyChain object; brand safety through TAG certification; consumer experience through the Coalition for Better Ads Standards; privacy through IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework; and greater supply-chain transparency through initiatives including the DemandChain object and Open Measurement SDK.
Standards need to move with the market
The market has changed, and the Gold Standard is evolving with it. Its expanded criteria now address CTV and retail media, strengthen expectations around supply-chain transparency and measurement, and introduce sustainability requirements. The details may be technical, but the objective is straightforward: give advertisers, publishers, and platforms a common basis for trust.
Here are three ways OpenX puts new and existing principles into practice.
1. Fraud Prevention and Supply Chain Transparency
Ads.txt and sellers.json help buyers verify who is authorized to sell an impression, while the SupplyChain object shows how that impression moved from the publisher to the buyer. But these tools only work when adoption is consistent. Gaps in the chain create gaps in visibility, and those are exactly where fraud and unnecessary intermediaries can hide.
100% of OpenX’s supply is ads.txt and sellers.json compliant, so buyers transact only with authorized sellers. Our Bidding Intelligence Data Set (BIDS) included in both OpenXSelect and OpenXBuild extends that transparency further, giving buyers log-level access to key auction insights so they can analyze performance and spend with real visibility into the chain.
2. Raising the Standard for CTV
CTV needs more than a digital label attached to a video impression. Buyers should be able to distinguish true glass-on-wall content from mobile video, user-generated content, or apps designed to imitate TV inventory. They also need consistent signals that support targeting, measurement, and reporting.
That principle launched TV by OpenX, which consists only of direct, broadcast-quality CTV inventory. We removed resellers, ad networks, fireplace apps, games, mobile inventory, UGC, and other content that does not meet that definition. We have also normalized millions of publisher-supplied genre variations into nine categories and 132 subcategories, making content signals easier for buyers and their DSPs to interpret. The Gold Standard’s focus on accurate classification, common formats, shared taxonomies, and interoperable measurement is the direction CTV needs.
3. Privacy and Sustainability
Privacy frameworks do not replace the law, but they do give the market a common mechanism for communicating consent and other privacy preferences. IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework gives publishers, platforms, and buyers a shared technical language for supporting GDPR and ePrivacy compliance, rather than leaving every participant to invent its own process.
The Gold Standard’s new sustainability pillar applies the same principle to infrastructure. By addressing inefficient refresh practices and requiring SSPs to use bid floors to limit low-value processing, it recognizes that unnecessary auctions carry a real computational and environmental cost.
For accountability to carry weight, it has to be independently verified, not simply asserted. That principle has shaped OpenX’s own approach. In 2022, we became the first SSP independently certified as a CarbonNeutral® company. We later became the first company across advertising, technology, and media to receive independent verification that it had met the key requirements of the Science Based Targets initiative’s Net-Zero Standard.
We would rather have our GHG inventories and emissions claims checked by a third party than grade our own homework. That is also why the Gold Standard’s independent annual audit matters: a standard is only credible when the evidence behind it can be tested.
Collective Adoption Is the Point
None of these challenges get solved by one company acting alone. They take all advertisers, publishers, and platforms across the supply chain to agree to meet the same standards — and be measured against them. That’s the real value of the Gold Standard: it turns industry commitments into something independently verifiable. OpenX supports that model, and the higher bar it sets for the market.
