Two items landed within 48 hours of each other this week that, read together, mark a new inventory class becoming buyable at scale.
On July 22, the IAB Tech Lab’s Advanced TV Working Group and its Ad Format Hero Task Force published finalised signalling for the CTV Ad Portfolio — covering six formats: Pause Ads, Menu/Home Screen Ads, Overlay Ads, Screensaver Ads, In Scene, and Squeezebacks. On July 24, AdExchanger detailed how Warner Bros. Discovery is building a business out of exactly this space.
01What the standard does
Usefully, the Tech Lab modified existing frameworks rather than inventing new ones:
- AdCOM gains expanded enumerations for placement identification, on-screen positioning and playback method.
- VAST changes so that
NonLinearAdsnow carries<MediaFiles>— applying the same delivery model linear ads have always used. - OpenRTB: menu and home-screen ads use the Native object; the other formats use the Video request object paired with NonLinear VAST delivery.
Compliance is required across SSPs, exchanges, DSPs, SSAI/CSAI providers and measurement partners for the signals to work end to end. That is the whole point — a pause ad that can’t be described in a bid request can only be sold by a salesperson on a phone call.
02What WBD is doing with it
WBD frames pause ads as creating new ad space — inventory that exists in the moment a viewer’s attention leaves the content — rather than interrupting anything. Standard pause ads launched on HBO Max in 2022 with soft gradient overlays that leave the underlying content visible. Shoppable pause ads, announced at May’s upfronts and expected later in 2026, add checkout: buy the item an actor is wearing, or a suggested alternative. WBD has also upgraded contextual targeting so advertisers can place against specific scene atmospheres — a beach scene for a travel brand.
The performance claims are strong and worth treating carefully: VP of Product Marketing Scott Rossman says WBD’s standard pause ads “drive over 200% lift in website visits” against industry benchmarks, per Disqo data. Cited research puts 67% of Gen Z and millennials as preferring pause ads to a frozen screen, and 51% as having taken action after seeing one.
Today, WBD sells these mostly through direct deals. Programmatic is under development, and WBD acknowledges the industry has to align on standards first. That is precisely the gap the Tech Lab just closed.
03Why this matters
| A new inventory unit is being defined right now, and the definition sticks | Once AdCOM enumerations and OpenRTB object mappings are set, that is the vocabulary the market will use for years. Formats that get specified get bought; formats that don't stay in direct-sales purgatory. |
|---|---|
| The economics are attractive because the inventory is incremental | Pause and menu ads don't cannibalise a mid-roll — they monetise a moment that produced nothing. Any publisher with a video player, an app, or a screensaver state has some version of this surface. |
| Non-video publishers should read the pattern, not just the spec | The move here is "find the dead moment in the user experience and make it a standardised, biddable unit." Interstitial states, load screens, app-resume moments and end-of-article states are the web equivalent, and no one has standardised them. |
Pause ads have existed since 2022 and stayed a direct-sold curiosity because there was no way to describe one in a bid request.
04What publishers should do
05What marketers should do
06The bottom line
Pause ads have existed since 2022 and stayed a direct-sold curiosity because there was no way to describe one in a bid request. That constraint was removed this week. The signalling standard is dull, technical and consequential in the way plumbing standards always are — it turns a bespoke sales conversation into a line in an OpenRTB object, which is the difference between a format and a market. Publishers with a screen and an idle moment now have something to sell that didn’t exist as programmatic inventory last month.