The Trade Desk has opened OpenPath, its direct publisher integration route, to connected TV pause ads, publishing creative specifications, bid request and bid response examples, and a VAST XML sample for the format. The documentation went live days after IAB Tech Lab finalized signaling guidance for six CTV formats on July 22, 2026, and the company credited the standards body and its partners publicly today.

Pause ads have been sellable on The Trade Desk since May. What they have not been is direct.

The distinction runs to the center of the company's supply chain strategy. OpenPath is the mechanism through which The Trade Desk connects its demand-side platform straight to publisher inventory, removing layers of intermediaries that would otherwise sit between a buyer and a seller. Adding a format to OpenPath is a different act from adding it to the buying interface. One expands what traders can purchase. The other changes who is standing in the middle when they purchase it.

What the documentation specifies

The pause ad entry sits under ad formats in the OpenPath section of The Trade Desk developer documentation, alongside connection types, policies and guidelines, and reports.

According to The Trade Desk, a pause ad is a television advertising experience initiated when a viewer uses a remote to pause the content being watched. The advertisement may overlay or replace the paused screen and remains visible as an embedded creative attribute. Viewers can interact with the paused screen using the remote, or scan elements of the creative such as a QR code.

Three behavioral rules define the placement. Pause ads appear after the viewer pauses, with a delay of one to three seconds. The advertisement stays visible until the viewer resumes playback. Where a viewer remains paused for an extended period, the creative may refresh after a set interval.

Creative constraints are deliberately narrow. According to The Trade Desk, the specifications were designed specifically in the context of a paused screen, and the format supports static creatives only, within a fixed size and dimension. Permitted file formats are PNG or JPG. No video file, no animation, no cinemagraph.

That restriction is worth sitting with, because the standard the format now signals against is broader than what The Trade Desk accepts. The finalized IAB Tech Lab guidance allows a NonLinear VAST response to deliver a static image, a cinemagraph, or a full-motion video file. The Trade Desk documentation permits one of those three. A publisher reading the specification and a buyer reading the OpenPath page are working from different ceilings, and reconciling them falls to whoever builds the integration.

Beyond the creative rules, the page documents click-throughs, a safe zone, a buffer zone, QR code handling, the pause ad format itself, a bid request example, a bid response example, a VAST XML example, and a set of frequently asked questions. The examples are the operationally significant part. Published request and response payloads give integration engineers something concrete to test against, which is the practical difference between a format that is announced and a format that ships.

From Kokai beta to direct supply

The Trade Desk moved CTV pause ads into open beta on May 12, 2026 as part of its Q2 2026 Kokai release. Activation, pacing and creative approval ran inside the standard campaign interface, and the company described the placement as a high-attention, user-initiated moment because the viewer chose to pause rather than having an advertisement interrupt playback.

The mechanics carried a significant limitation. Pause ads transacted through private marketplace deals or programmaticguaranteed arrangements, not the open auction. Every activation still required a negotiated relationship.

Direct supply through OpenPath addresses the other side of that equation. Publishers integrated with OpenPath can expose pause inventory to The Trade Desk without routing through a supply-side platform, and the published bid request and response examples define how that inventory is described. Whether it removes the deal negotiation entirely is not something the documentation claims.

The standard underneath

The technical vocabulary this depends on was finalized two days earlier. According to IAB Tech Lab, its CTV Ad Format Signaling work introduces or amends specific metadata fields inside bid requests and bid responses, covering six formats: pause, menu and home screen, overlay, screensaver, in scene, and squeezebacks.

The changes extend existing structures rather than creating new ones. AdCOM enumerations expand across three attributes: plcmt, identifying the format; pos, describing on-screen position; and playbackmethod. VAST NonLinearAds now carries <MediaFiles>, applying the delivery model linear advertisements have always used. Pause, screensaver, overlay, squeezeback and in-scene placements all pair the Video request object with NonLinear VAST delivery. Menu and home screen units take a separate route through the Native object in OpenRTB, because those advertisements are rendered by the CTV platform rather than delivered as a single finished creative.

According to IAB Tech Lab, the six formats had been running in market in silos through custom integration paths, leaving buyers without consistency and, in some cases, without transparency around how the advertisements render and perform. The organization stated that demand-side and supply-side platforms trade on the shared language of OpenRTB, and that until this release the language did not describe these formats.

The obligations are distributed. Supply-side platforms, exchanges, demand-side platforms, server-side and client-side ad insertion vendors and measurement partners are required to carry the new enumerations and honor the VAST changes. Demand-side platforms carry an additional requirement to integrate the signals in order to decision on them.

Those definitions originated in the CTV Ad Portfolio that IAB Tech Lab released for public comment on December 11, 2025, assembled from more than 100 real-world format submissions. The Trade Desk was among the contributing companies at that stage.

Credit and contributors

The Trade Desk acknowledged the collaboration publicly today. Daniel Spring, who joined the company in March 2026 as senior staff product manager for RTB and inventory after nearly five years at Yahoo directing product management for advanced television and digital out-of-home, credited IAB Tech Lab, Seven.One Entertainment Group and the partner companies involved in a LinkedIn post linking to The Trade Desk partner resources portal.

The post named contributors including Rob Hazan, Andrew Eifler, Mike O'Sullivan, Carol T., Andrew Goodrich, Benjamin Nowicki, Sean H., Will Doherty, Andrew Delaney and Abhishek Vashisht. Doherty, senior vice president of inventory partnerships, was the executive the company put forward when Samsung Ads opened its Smart TV home screens to programmatic buying through The Trade Desk and Google DV360 on June 10, 2026. The Trade Desk corporate account replied to the post calling it "An important step forward!" At the time of capture the post carried 50 reactions and four reposts.

The presence of Seven.One Entertainment Group in the credits is notable on its own. The German broadcaster sits inside the ProSiebenSat.1 group, and its involvement points the pause ad work at European broadcast inventory rather than at United States streaming alone.

OpenPath's contested year

The format addition lands on a route that has had a difficult eighteen months, and the surrounding record matters for reading the announcement.

Adweek reported on February 20, 2026 that Dentsu and WPP had quietly exited OpenPath, both holding companies citing a lack of transparency around where advertisements were actually running alongside what they described as hidden fees. In March, Publicis Groupe audited the platform's fee application and pulled The Trade Desk from its recommended DSP list; the dispute ran three months before the two companies issued a joint resolution statement on June 12, 2026.

Expansion continued through the same period. The company signed Massarius as its first Dutch OpenPath publisher in June 2026 at a 4.5 percent fee, and it built out a wider set of open-branded products, including OpenAds in October 2025 and OpenTTD in March 2026.

CTV supply has been the more consistent story. The company added Netflix to its Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace on July 20, 2026 with no minimum spend requirement, four days before the pause ad documentation surfaced.

Where the format sits commercially

Pause advertising stopped being experimental some time ago. Magnite announced availability across DirecTV, Dish Media and Fubo in August 2025. Netflix presented programmatic pause ads at its 2026 upfront on May 13, 2026. Philo brought the format to market through Magnite, Index Exchange and six SSP partners in June 2026.

Measurement arrived alongside the supply. WunderKIND Ads published cross-vertical attention benchmarks on June 17, 2026 drawn from second-by-second TVision panel data across 15 verticals, reporting roughly twice the attention of standard 60-second CTV spots, with automotive pause creative recording 34.2 seconds of attention time against 12.2 seconds for the comparable video placement. Those figures came from a vendor with a commercial stake in the format, which is a qualification that travels with them.

Why it matters for the marketing community

For media buyers, the change is narrower than the surrounding activity suggests, and more consequential in one specific respect.

Pause inventory bought through an intermediated path carries fee layers that compound at each hop. Direct integration removes some of those layers, which is the entire commercial argument for OpenPath and the reason holding companies scrutinized it so closely when transparency questions arose. Whether a given publisher's pause supply is genuinely cheaper through OpenPath than through a supply-side platform is an empirical question that varies by relationship, not a property of the route.

For publishers, the calculation is about control. Exposing pause inventory directly means describing it in bid requests the buyer's documentation already defines, with a creative ceiling the buyer already publishes. Static PNG or JPG within a fixed dimension is a simpler contract to honor than a variable NonLinear payload, and it reduces the failure mode where an unsupported creative reaches a placement that cannot render it.

For the reporting layer, distinct plcmt values matter more than either. When a pause advertisement, an overlay and a squeezeback all resolve to the same generic video placement type in a log file, no post-campaign analysis can separate them. Countability is a precondition for comparing cost per attention second, and it is the thing the finalized standard supplies that no single platform could supply alone.

The gap between publication and implementation remains open. IAB Tech Lab is a member consortium rather than a regulator, and its specifications carry no enforcement mechanism. Regional bodies have meanwhile built parallel scaffolding, including IAB Spain's harmonization guide for CTV bid request parameters published on January 27, 2026 with participation from sixteen companies including The Trade Desk. A finalized global layer gives those documents a reference point. It does not reconcile them, and it does not oblige anyone to adopt it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Trade Desk, the independent demand-side platform, published pause ad specifications in the OpenPath section of its developer documentation. Daniel Spring, senior staff product manager for RTB and inventory, credited IAB Tech Lab, Seven.One Entertainment Group and named partner contributors, including inventory partnerships head Will Doherty, in a public LinkedIn post.

What: Support for connected TV pause ads on OpenPath, The Trade Desk's direct publisher integration route. The documentation covers creative rules limiting the format to static PNG or JPG files within a fixed size and dimension, a one to three second delay after the viewer pauses, persistence until playback resumes, refresh after a set interval during long pauses, click-throughs, safe zone, buffer zone, QR code handling, and worked bid request, bid response and VAST XML examples.

When: The documentation surfaced today, two days after IAB Tech Lab finalized its CTV Ad Format Signaling guidance on July 22, 2026. Pause ads had entered open beta on the company's Kokai platform on May 12, 2026, restricted to private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed transactions.

Where: Global, through The Trade Desk developer documentation and the OpenPath publisher integration. Named partner Seven.One Entertainment Group extends the work to German broadcast inventory.

Why: Pause inventory had been transacting through custom integration paths and negotiated deals, with fees compounding at each intermediary hop and no shared vocabulary in OpenRTB to describe the format. Direct integration paired with finalized AdCOM and VAST signaling makes the placement describable in a bid request, countable in reporting, and available without an intervening supply-side platform.