Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust. Others have even shut down in the face of lawsuits claiming insufficiently broad industry engagement. Why?
Because we mistake the release of a proposal for the achievement of standardization and create more noise than clarity.
My standards journey began with IAB’s Future of the Cookie (FotC) working group, where I represented Yahoo in 2013, years before Apple and GDPR disrupted cookies. That group offered a taste of what the industry could accomplish together. It was a precursor to the IAB Tech Lab, which I later led as its first independent CEO. At Tech Lab, the remarkable volunteer effort and potential of 20 working groups tackling complex industry problems was unmistakable.
But politics among trade orgs and some member companies thwarted the adoption of important Tech Lab standards. Frustrated, I accepted a newly created exec role with Meta (née Facebook), a company that was uniquely positioned to invest in industry projects and break silos. We made real progress, particularly with privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), but Meta turned inward when Apple’s ATT rollout hit revenue. That inflection point led me to found ThinkMedium, an advisory firm that has promoted privacy-forward data practices and standards for brand safety and measurement.
After 23 years in advertising technology, most of which I’ve spent working with and within standards bodies, I’ve seen why some standards gain traction and others don’t. I’ve also seen where we overreached, where we underestimated misaligned incentives and how we can sustain an industry that supports the content and services we all use.
So why do some standards fail?
Standards are protocols and specifications, services and other guidance. They enable interoperability (e.g., OpenRTB for programmatic buying/selling), foster transparency for a set purpose (ads.txt and sellers.json for fraud prevention), provide shared services (Prebid.org) and/or support a more consistent and compliant ecosystem (ad formats, Global Privacy Platform).
Despite noble intentions, many standards efforts don’t gain wide adoption. Timing is often an issue.
Standards that address a pressing need – like the Transparency and Consent Framework for GDPR – are adopted quickly.
Others are released before the market is ready. The Data Transparency Standard and Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA) were novel efforts initiated in 2017 and 2019, respectively, but they didn’t take off because some companies benefited from opacity in data sources and practices and others were in denial about the future of third-party data. Encouragingly, today’s interest in data-driven curation, Tech Lab’s SDA repackaging and constraints on third-party data may reinvigorate these efforts.
Other standards are too narrow. Early taxonomy work, for example, needed to be expanded to make it adaptable for buyers and sellers across media channels, notably CTV.
Conversely, other standards are too complex. OpenRTB 3.0 offered a major architectural upgrade, but it was a “breaking release” that required more effort than most companies were willing to invest.
There’s also the issue of competition. Standards often falter when one company advocates for an approach that others resist — or when the sell side and buy side have competing motivations. In some cases, useful industry utilities die altogether, as when the DigiTrust identity matching service (born from the FoTC group) was sunsetted in favor of proprietary offerings.
Competition also dampens engagement from the buy side. Marketers tend to lean on agencies to solve challenges that standards are designed to address. But agency incentives lead them to provide proprietary and custom solutions to reinforce their value to marketers, rather than embracing standards that could drive efficiency and innovation.
A deja vu moment
Two developments led me to write this now.
First, the surge of interest in curation made clear that longstanding, relevant standards – like the Tech Lab’s SDA spec – were being overlooked.
Second, the uphill battle we’ve faced with ThinkMedium’s Readiness Strategy Program, designed to address data, identity and privacy shifts, has echoed challenges I’ve seen too many times before. Engagement in the program has been bogged down by companies’ competing short-term revenue priorities, shifting plans for cookie deprecation, inertia and false security surrounding legacy solutions and practices.
Breaking the cycle through collaboration and activation
To change this dynamic, we must stop overproducing and underactivating standards. This means creating fewer standards that have the greatest real-world value – and even deprecating some that reinforce legacy practices, rather than serving evolving needs.
Securing upfront commitments from key players that can create adoption momentum should be the norm, as when Google and The Trade Desk backed ads.txt in its early days. Pilots of some standards (as Tech Lab is doing with Trusted Server) can also help clarify potential or expose dead ends.
We can no longer afford to be overly proprietary or anchored in fragile solutions. The privacy landscape is shifting. PETs and generative AI are already reshaping how we think about personalization, content creation, attribution and more. Consumer expectations are rising. And our fragmented response isn’t built to last.
Imagine if Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or USB weren’t governed by standards. Device makers, software developers and consumers would suffer. That’s the kind of inefficiency we risk when the advertising industry behaves as though foundational alignment is optional.
It’s time to collaborate and recognize that innovation and responsibility go hand in hand. Building differentiated products atop shared infrastructure is not a compromise; it’s a strategy for resilience. Open Measurement stands as a shining example of what’s possible when we choose to build together.
Let’s work together to leapfrog to greater privacy, safety and efficiency with effective standards and models. I’ve seen what works, what fails and what gets forgotten. Complacency and one-off efforts won’t get us where we need to be. Let’s acknowledge what hasn’t worked, fix what we can and commit together to building what sticks. Our industry’s future depends on it.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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