Format of the Bid request in Realtime bidding

[Cretus Mukiza]

Hello,

I am using open RTB protocol version 2.5.

I have been inspecting the format of the bid requests to my endpoint.

I am not receiving the site or app categories "IAB categories".

Are these fields deprecated?

If so is there a workaround?

Best regards,

Cretus

[Mark Saniscalchi]

Hello Cretus,

BidRequest.app.cat is redacted, which explains the lack of app categories. Our documentation doesn't suggest a similar redaction for BidRequest.site.cat, but the blog post announcing the change seems to indicate other categories are impacted as well–which seems consistent with our current set of sample bid requests, which don't include these categories either. Nonetheless, I'll reach out internally to confirm.

Regards,

Mark

[Cretus Mukiza]

Hello Mark,

Thank you for your support.

I can see in the authorized buyer's documentation both fields BidRequest.site.cat and BidRequest.app.cat are not supported.

Currently, I am looking for a workaround and there are not many options at the moment.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Regards,

Cretus Mukiza

[Mark Saniscalchi]

Hello Cretus,

I've discussed this internally, and can confirm that all contextual category fields are redacted at this point. While we need to update our documentation to better reflect that, it is working as intended for BidRequest.site.cat to not be populated. As far as workarounds go, that will depend on your intended use-case. For example, if one of your goals is to bid on inventory focused on Arts & Entertainment, you should include the corresponding ID from publisher-verticals.txt (see reference data) in your pretargeting configuration's verticalTargeting.includedIds field. If there's a specific thing you're trying to do that doesn't seem feasible, feel free to let me know and I can investigate further.

Note, however, that some of this may be intentional given that the goal of these redactions was to protect user privacy.

Regards,

Mark