Technology
Prebid changes its chair and looks for a president. Why it matters for the open web
Programmatic Spain reports that Joel Meyer, CTO of OpenX and a Prebid board member since 2023, has been named chairman after serving as interim chair. His first task is finding a successor to Mike Racic as president, with a profile "more oriented to product and technology", before the Prebid Summit on October 13 in New York.
The priorities he lists are the open web's to-do list: transparency along the supply chain, tools so publishers can monetize inventory whatever protocol the buyer uses, and an agnostic stance among the competing standards for AI agents (AdCP, IAB Tech Lab's protocols, MCP). Prebid says membership grew 300% in five years and now reaches mobile, native and digital out-of-home.
The same month, PubMatic announced it is discontinuing OpenWrap Web, its Prebid wrapper for web publishers, affecting around 250 sites, while keeping the mobile SDK. The reason given is telling: a web wrapper gives no exclusive access to inventory, because a publisher can use it to reach competing platforms. Playwire is the recommended landing spot.
Read together, the two stories point the same way. The wrapper is becoming infrastructure that publishers, or whoever operates for them, own directly, while platforms keep what gives them exclusivity. That is why our anchor and in-content formats run on our own Prebid.js wrapper, with no ad server in between and the publisher's tag untouched.
Sources and reading
Programmatic Spain: Joel Meyer liderará el reajuste de Prebid · Programmatic Spain: PubMatic se deshace de su wrapper Prebid Web · Prebid.org