Open Deal Protocol (ODP)

An open, vendor-neutral protocol for the end-to-end direct deal lifecycle between any buyer and any seller: discovery, proposal, acceptance, delivery, reporting, settlement. Federated, signed, no required intermediary. Covers programmatic guaranteed, preferred deals, private auctions, and direct/IO-style deals under one wire.

Status: Working draft, v0.1, not for implementation Spec: SPEC.md Discussion: GitHub Discussions · Issues

What this is

Direct deals between advertisers and publishers (programmatic guaranteed, preferred deals, sponsorships, IO-based direct sold, content integrations) move through proprietary ad-server interfaces, manual insertion-order PDFs, per-platform deal IDs, and reconciliation spreadsheets. There is no open, vendor-neutral protocol for the deal lifecycle itself. The auction layer has OpenRTB; the deal layer above it has nothing equivalent.

ODP defines that layer. It introduces a new deal type called Open Deals (OD) that generalizes programmatic guaranteed, preferred deals, private auctions, and direct/IO-style deals into one wire-defined lifecycle. Any buyer can propose. Any seller can accept. Negotiation, activation, delivery reporting, and settlement are signed end-to-end. No central registry. No required intermediary.

Six wire primitives, one per lifecycle stage:

1. Inventory descriptor. Published by the seller in their well-known file. What they will sell and on what terms.
2. Deal proposal. Signed POST from buyer to seller with deal type, inventory, pricing, flight, creative, audience.
3. Deal response. Signed accept, counter, or reject.
4. Active deal record. Bilaterally signed deal that the serving agent recognizes at impression time.
5. Delivery record. Signed periodic report from seller to buyer.
6. Settlement attestation. Signed reconciliation closing out a delivery period.

Authentication uses the same SPF + DKIM + DMARC federated model as OCP: each party publishes signing keys and authorized agents in their well-known file, every wire request is signed with Ed25519, and reconciliation is by signature, not invoice.

Who this is for

• Premium publishers running direct-sold campaigns who want to free their workflow from any single ad-server vendor's lock-in.
• Advertisers and agencies who want to transact direct deals across N publishers with one integration.
• DSPs and SSPs who want to act as buyer or seller agents in a federated model without being the load-bearing intermediary.
• Ad servers and ad-tech vendors who want a standard protocol to build serving infrastructure against.
• Affiliate networks and content commerce platforms who want a deal-layer wire that fits their non-RTB workflows.

Relationship to existing work

ODP is complementary to most existing standards, not competing:

• OpenRTB: ODP is the deal-layer protocol that sits above RTB's auction layer. An Open Deal can carry an OpenRTB-compatible deal.id so existing RTB delivery infrastructure recognizes it.
• IAB OpenDirect (2017): a redo with federated cryptographic authentication, broader deal-type coverage, and modern settlement primitives.
• Prebid: publisher-side auction orchestration; orthogonal to deal-layer.
• AdCP (Ad Context Protocol): agent-orchestration protocol for advertising workflows. ODP is the cryptographic contract layer for the deals AdCP agents negotiate. AdCP's create_media_buy materializes as an ODP-signed deal proposal/acceptance; delivery and settlement run on ODP. The two specs compose into a "fully agentic, fully contractual" stack without requiring each other.
• OCP (the Open Conversion Pingback protocol): sister-spec for post-click conversion attribution. ODP and OCP compose well together (deal delivers a click, OCP fires the resulting conversion back to the seller) but neither requires the other.

See SPEC.md § Relationship to existing work for the full landscape.

Status and roadmap

This is a v0.1 working draft. Not ready for implementation. Current focus is gathering feedback from publisher direct-sold ad ops, programmatic guaranteed product teams, DSP and SSP engineering, ad-server vendors, and standards practitioners.

Near-term:

• Open feedback period via Issues and Discussions
• Iterate toward v0.2 incorporating community input
• Engage IAB Tech Lab on the relationship to OpenRTB Deal IDs and the legacy OpenDirect spec

How to participate

• Read SPEC.md
• Comment on the design via Discussions for open-ended questions or Issues for specific spec defects or proposals
• Propose changes via pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

All participation is governed by the Code of Conduct.

Licensing

This specification is published under terms designed to keep it permanently open and royalty-free:

• Specification text: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0)
• Reference code (when added): Apache License 2.0, with explicit patent grant
• Patent posture: see PATENTS.md. Contributors grant a royalty-free patent license to anyone implementing the spec, with a defensive termination clause if any party initiates patent litigation against the spec or its implementations.

If you cannot accept these terms, do not contribute.

Governance

See GOVERNANCE.md. Currently maintained by the original author with the explicit intent to move to a neutral working-group home as the spec matures.

Author and sponsor

Authored by Amir Rad. Initial work sponsored by Whimful FZ-LLC, a CAPI provider for the open web. Whimful has no special status in the spec; it is one ad-tech provider among many that this protocol is intended to serve.

Prior art and defensive publication

This document is published openly to establish prior art and to ensure no party can later claim exclusive patent rights over the techniques described herein. See PATENTS.md for the full non-assertion pledge.