IAB Tech Lab Turns 10 Years Old; Unveils 2024 Priorities & Roadmap

Calls for Industry Adoption of Privacy, Addressability, Advanced TV, and Programmatic Standards to Address Industry Challenges

IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body, unveiled its key priorities and roadmap for 2024 today. The roadmap addresses crucial pain points and challenges, ensuring the industry is aware and actively engaged in evolving digital advertising standards.

The 2024 roadmap identifies colossal shifts in digital advertising, happening simultaneously in the form of critical browser and platform changes, ongoing privacy regulation globally, accelerated growth in streaming (CTV), combined with the convergence of CTV and linear television, and cross-environment measurement challenges in an ever-expanding environment of signal loss.

“The digital advertising industry is standing on the precipice of profound change,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. “The specifications we’ve outlined don’t just reflect anticipated shifts – they’re a clarion call for industry adaptation and resilience. We’re dedicated to championing collaboration and embrace this critical year as an opportunity to shape a more adaptive and ethically sound future for digital advertising.”

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IAB Tech Lab’s Product Roadmap showcases its top priorities as developed by its global members and approved by the Board of Directors, comprised of industry leaders from over thirty leading ad tech, media companies, and agencies:

• Advanced TV Creative ID Framework Spanning Digital and Linear: IAB Tech Lab is spearheading a crucial cross-television measurement and reconciliation framework. Collaborating with the industry, IAB Tech Lab will establish a comprehensive Creative ID Framework, giving all segments of television delivery a fundamental building block, answering what played where and when while helping buyers understand the value of ubiquitous use of a creative ID across all television environments. This framework will be supported by standardized labeling and retrieval of advertiser metadata, allowing the industry to support new currencies and reconciliation methods more rapidly.
• Ongoing Fragmentation of Privacy Laws: There are three new US states with privacy laws going into effect in 2024 (and two going into effect in early 2025). Accompanied by new privacy and personal data regulations in international markets such as India and Brazil, 2024 will bring legal and technical professionals together in IAB Tech Lab’s Global Privacy Working Group to enhance the Global Privacy Platform (GPP), ensuring compliance across all new jurisdictions.
• Addressability & Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Industries are actively developing innovative privacy-first addressability solutions in response to the uncertain fate of third-party cookies and other legacy identifiers. Whether it’s new synthetic identity solutions or Privacy Enhancing Technologies such as Secure Multi-Party Compute (SMPC), Differential Privacy, and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) at the forefront of this privacy-by-design addressable revolution, IAB Tech Lab is defining guidance regarding advertising use cases and new technical standards for addressing known and unknown audiences, supporting innovation in data-secure addressability solutions within the digital advertising ecosystem.
• Measurement: In 2024, the IAB Tech Lab is prioritizing comprehensive cross-environment measurement strategies as data signal loss complicates understanding consumer behavior and measuring campaign effectiveness. While initially centered on viewability via the Open Measurement SDK, IAB Tech Lab’s measurement initiative will evolve, encompassing diverse measurement use cases across multiple media environments.
• What Platform Changes Mean for You: Web browsers and mobile platforms more frequently offer proprietary solutions for advertising and measurement in their applications. Along with industry-developed addressability solutions like Data Clean Rooms and ID solutions, these proprietary APIs are a new area for the industry to investigate, test, and develop potential solutions to add to portfolios of addressability. IAB Tech Lab will dive deep into new measurement methodologies and analyze new addressability mechanisms based on these APIs to provide unbiased guidance to the industry.
• Buyside Education & Adoption: This year, IAB Tech Lab will emphasize educational content development, emphasizing who benefits and why. Initiatives include brand and agency content development and another ad operations workshop focusing on the Advanced TV Creative ID Framework. These initiatives aim to raise awareness about standards and specifications in the market, fostering a better understanding among buyers and sellers of the benefits of utilizing these standards for their business.
• To support adoption, IAB Tech Lab will provide persona-based implementation guides, host events tailored to specific industry segments, and offer extensive supporting materials for specifications, ensuring a simple integration process. IAB Tech Lab will also expand its educational outreach to guide the market through implementation use cases, leveraging workshops, expert-led events, and tailored educational sessions designed to empower industry participants with actionable insights.

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In conjunction with its 2024 priorities, IAB Tech Lab is excited to announce its 10th anniversary at the IAB Tech Lab Summit on June 11-12, 2024. This milestone event will celebrate a decade of setting technical standards, industry collaboration, and innovation, and will showcase critical industry achievements. The summit will include keynote speakers addressing artificial intelligence, privacy & data security, and a lifetime achievement awards dinner recognizing exceptional contributions to the digital media industry.

There is no shortage of standards work to be done in 2024, and while IAB Tech Lab’s focus is evident with its top priorities, the industry also needs to continue evolving existing standards. OpenRTB saw three version updates in 2023 to support new features for programmatic efficiencies in CTV, identify potential Made-For-Advertising sites and more. The working group already has a dozen working proposals to consider for 2024 updates. We’ll also see much-needed changes in the VAST standard to support the Creative ID Framework.

2024 signifies a new phase in elevating industry standards and fostering a more robust, efficient, and data-secure digital advertising ecosystem. IAB Tech Lab urges digital advertising professionals and technical experts to engage actively in its initiatives, adding their input to develop industry standards to drive the global digital ad economy forward.