Smarter Supply, Stronger Results: A Q&A with OpenX on Premium Inventory and Identity Innovation

As part of our ongoing SSP Partner Series, we’re highlighting how top supply-side platforms define and deliver premium inventory—and what that means for advertisers in a more complex, data-driven, and privacy-conscious media landscape.

Our next spotlight shines on OpenX, a partner that continues to evolve the programmatic ecosystem through cloud-based technology, transparent supply paths, and proprietary identity solutions. Known for their commitment to ethical practices, high-quality curation, and real-time insights, OpenX empowers advertisers to confidently reach audiences with precision and scale.

We caught up with Gil Sommer, VP of Global Product at OpenX, to explore how they define quality, support performance-driven targeting, and help brands cut through complexity with smarter media strategies. Let’s get into it.

An Ethical, Data-Driven SSP Built for the Future

Can you briefly overview your company and how you support advertisers?

OpenX is an innovative supply-side platform (SSP) built on responsible business practices, unlocking unique value and delivering premium programmatic inventory across CTV, video, display, mobile app, and native. Our exchange, curation platform, and identity graph leverage proprietary AI, 250+ data and identity partners, and 150,000+ direct website and app connections to drive qualified consumer reach at scale across global digital media channels.

Powered by 100% cloud-based technology, OpenX simplifies the programmatic value chain, ensuring media spend supports the creation of high-quality digital content while providing robust fraud protection and MFA and brand safety filters. Our ethical, data-driven solutions and efficient technology foster valuable connections between advertisers, publishers, and consumers, driving a higher-performing and more sustainable ecosystem through data-driven curation.

Partnering with OpenX means gaining access to a differentiated SSP with a proprietary, future-proofed identity graph designed for precise targeting and responsible media buys. Our approach places transparency and control at the center for buyers, protecting media investments, enhancing campaign performance, and delivering measurable outcomes with confidence.

Trust First: How OpenX Maintains Brand Safety and Fraud Prevention

What brand safety and quality standards do you maintain for your inventory?

We maintain multiple layers of verification to ensure advertisers access only brand-safe and fraud-free inventory, ultimately enhancing campaign performance and protecting brand integrity. 

• Third-Party Validation: OpenX is independently certified for all TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group) programs, including fraud, brand safety, malware, and transparency. We comply 100% with industry standards like ads.txt and sellers.json to verify inventory sources and prevent unauthorized reselling. 
• Inventory Curation: OpenX focuses on high-viewability, high-attention curated packages, ensuring that buyers appear in premium, brand-safe environments.
• Fraud Prevention & Traffic Quality: OpenX automatically blocks duplicative and non-valuable traffic, optimizing for the most premium and high-performing inventory.
• Transparency & Reporting: OpenX provides detailed insights into inventory sources, brand safety controls, and measurement tools.

Defining “Premium” Across Channels, Especially CTV

What criteria is used to define your inventory as premium or high-quality?

We apply strict classification and sourcing standards across web, app, and CTV environments. This includes qualifying our curated inventory through an array of criteria, such as viewability and engagement metrics, third-party validation and certification (OpenX is the only leading independent SSP to be TAG Certified for Transparency), fraud prevention and inventory filtering, direct publisher relationships, brand safety filters, and transparent inventory reporting.

For CTV specifically, TV by OpenX set a new bar for biddable CTV by eliminating all resellers in our CTV offering, offering 100% direct access to premium, broadcast-quality content. With direct integrations across more than 115 million measurable CTV devices, buyers gain greater transparency, control, and log-level data visibility, further reinforcing our commitment to high-quality supply and a more transparent marketplace.

Log-Level Intelligence: Using Supply-Side Data to Drive Smarter Targeting

What insights are you able to surface for advertisers to use to help them better understand their audiences?

OpenX offers log-level reporting via its Bidding Intelligence Data Set (BIDS) solution. Through BIDS, buyers can unlock insights and drive superior ROAS by leveraging 40+ data fields across their campaigns over the previous 14 days. These deep insights help buyers tailor their curation strategies to ensure optimized results across their campaigns.   

How do these audience insights help advertisers reach more effectively?

BIDS empowers advertisers to refine targeting, optimize spend, and maximize campaign performance by leveraging deep supply-side insights. By analyzing inventory performance across audience segments, buyers can make data-driven bidding decisions, improving win rates while minimizing waste. 

Connecting with Hard-to-Reach and High-Intent Audiences

How do your audience insights help advertisers reach diverse, unique, or hard-to-reach audiences?

Our audience insights empower advertisers to connect with diverse, niche, and hard-to-reach audiences through privacy-first, data-driven targeting solutions. By leveraging first- and third-party data integrations, our proprietary identity graph enables cookieless, cross-device, and cross-platform targeting, ensuring seamless engagement across CTV, mobile, and desktop.

Through premium, curated inventory, including diversity-owned media PMPs and high-attention environments, advertisers gain access to multicultural, underrepresented, and passion-driven communities. With deep behavioral insights, contextual relevance, and supply-side data, brands can refine their bidding strategies, maximize engagement, and optimize ROI.

Identity-Powered Precision in the Right Moments

How do you enable advertisers to reach relevant audiences within the right timeline?

Our identity graph gives us insight into 237 million monthly active users that we can match and activate curated deals against across CTV, mobile web, app, and desktop. We can then provide buyers with automated reports of exposed IDs in real time, which buyers can use to optimize campaigns in-flight. This further improves performance, helping buyers reach the right audience at the right time on the right property for a fair price. 

Rebuilding the Supply Chain with Smarter SPO

Is there anything unique about your approach to supply path optimization (SPO) that advertisers should know?

SPO should be about more than commercial agreements, as these incentives only truly move the needle if advertisers are getting premium, direct supply. At OpenX, we prioritize SPO by giving buyers greater control and minimizing unnecessary intermediaries. As a direct and trusted partner to the world’s largest premium publishers, we ensure a clean, efficient supply chain that maximizes working media and minimizes invalid traffic.

Having long prioritized transparency across web and app inventory, we’ve now applied that same rigorous approach to CTV. With the launch of TV by OpenX, ensuring that buyers access only direct, high-quality supply, while publishers receive their fair share of transactions. By cleaning up the supply chain, we provide advertisers with more control and optimization, maximizing working media and minimizing invalid traffic across all environments.

Driving Better Outcomes Through Trusted Partnerships

At Digilant, we know that the strength of our SSP relationships directly impacts our ability to deliver on performance, scale, and transparency for our clients. OpenX’s cloud-first infrastructure, robust identity framework, and commitment to high-quality, brand-safe inventory make them an invaluable part of that strategy.

With tools that offer greater buyer control, clearer supply chains, and deeper audience insights, OpenX helps advertisers maximize every impression—connecting media investment to measurable outcomes.

Stay tuned for the next installment in our SSP Partner Series, where we continue to highlight the platforms shaping the future of programmatic media.