PUC, in its attempt to be universal and perpetually backwards-compatible, has accumulated a considerable amount of complexity. Despite that, it cannot claim to be universal in any useful sense; creatives for different use cases need to be set up differently, with the only point they share in common being a script URL (and efforts to separate those as well).
Some publishers report a significant revenue drop with the use of PUC, and prefer to use alternatives - but that's not straightforward for native, for which we provide an implementation only through PUC.
Proposal
Move native rendering logic into Prebid.js and make it available through renderAd. This means dropping the option to define the native template in GAM; instead, it should be provided as adUnit.native.adTemplate. The logic to find the appropriate native assets and interpolating them would be managed by Prebid in a similar way to how it now deals with banner ad macros.
Make rendered native ads available through the same cross-frame channel as banner ads. With the above, the creative could be truly agnostic to whether it's dealing with one or the other - it would ideally just ask Prebid for some markup and drop it on the page.
Make the PUC-less example available as a standalone script, as the "new PUC", and have it be the preferred way to render cross-domain ads. It should stay small enough, and require few enough updates, that publishers can still choose to embed it in their creatives to improve revenue.
Open questions
Native custom rendering: the current API for custom renderers is not compatible with them being run on the Prebid.js window (because it asks to define a window.renderAd function). It's also not clear if custom renderers as standalone scripts still make sense in a world where rendering is managed and configured directly by Prebid.
PUC, in its attempt to be universal and perpetually backwards-compatible, has accumulated a considerable amount of complexity. Despite that, it cannot claim to be universal in any useful sense; creatives for different use cases need to be set up differently, with the only point they share in common being a script URL (and efforts to separate those as well).
Some publishers report a significant revenue drop with the use of PUC, and prefer to use alternatives - but that's not straightforward for native, for which we provide an implementation only through PUC.
Proposal
renderAd. This means dropping the option to define the native template in GAM; instead, it should be provided asadUnit.native.adTemplate. The logic to find the appropriate native assets and interpolating them would be managed by Prebid in a similar way to how it now deals with banner ad macros.Open questions
window.renderAdfunction). It's also not clear if custom renderers as standalone scripts still make sense in a world where rendering is managed and configured directly by Prebid.See also
https://github.com/prebid/Prebid.js/issues/8358 https://github.com/prebid/prebid-universal-creative/issues/187