IAB Tech Lab

Curated deals were once seen as a smart way to bring structure to programmatic chaos. Today, they’ve become table stakes.

Advertisers love new ad formats, especially on connected TV. Just look at how many platforms announced their own during the IAB NewFronts and TV upfronts last month. But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.

IAB Tech Lab to highlight the industry’s favorite CTV ad formats; how agentic AI could transform ad agency practices; and the Trump tariffs trigger an uptick in false “Made in America” claims.

Can the IAB Tech Lab’s Trusted Server initiative really help restore publishers’ ownership of monetization and wrestle back control from Big Tech and walled gardens?

Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust thanks to industry politics and competing interests. Here’s how the industry can stop sabotaging its own progress.

You know that old saw about how regulators aren’t technical and don’t understand how online advertising works? Yeah, that’s not a thing anymore.

CTV advertising has made great strides, but it still lags behind social platforms in one critical area: optimizing campaigns based on outcome data. Here’s how standardized conversion API integrations for CTV can help.

Industry experts agree that the bot activity analyzed in the latest Adalytics report is among the easiest type of invalid traffic to spot.

The IAB Tech Lab is proposing that ad auctions move to a Trusted Server from the browser. Why its prototype attracted controversy. Plus, should data privacy be viewed as a badge of honor, or a baseline standard?

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has three strategic priorities in 2025, and, you guessed it, online tracking is one of them.

It’s difficult for advertisers to enter into contracts with every company to which they disclose personal information. However, difficulty is no longer an acceptable excuse.

Why should establishing consumer trust be a differentiator – and wouldn’t it be great if that was just every company’s MO?

Many in the industry see Google’s fingerprinting reversal as an irresponsible move due to privacy concerns, particularly in regions with strict data regulations.

Why should browsers get to control publisher monetization? That’s the question the Tech Lab is aiming to answer with the release of an open-source framework for server-side ad management.

The curation debate is missing a critical piece: standardized reporting. Without it, curation risks leaving publishers in the dark about its actual value.

If we’re to leave behind the third-party cookie era, the rest of the ecosystem must reassert the role it plays in setting the agenda.

A concept known as data minimization – the practice of limiting data collection and retention to only what’s strictly necessary to achieve a specific purpose – is becoming a key tenet of privacy legislation around the world.

AdExchanger reached out to a number of major DSPs to gauge the current state of adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s new video ad standard.

CTV transparency remains a flashpoint between advertisers who want it and broadcasters who won’t provide it. Our special guest, Jounce Media’s Chris Kane, weighs in. Plus, we examine a persistent issue in ad tech: the chronic mislabeling of instream video.

Meta and Mozilla’s new browser-based attribution system for web ads appears to solve an interesting math problem. But if applied to real-world advertising, it will increase privacy risks for users, writes Raptive’s Don Marti.

The IAB predicts what privacy laws might be passed by the new congress; AI-generated newsletters are competing with local news; and the IAB Tech Lab ramps up production of new OpenRTB specs.

Yahoo’s endorsement could drive further adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s data transparency labels throughout the programmatic ecosystem after years of inaction.

DSPs have been slow to adopt the Tech Lab’s new signal for classifying online video, causing confusion about which placement signal should be prioritized.

The first half of this decade has left publishers reeling from a pandemic jab and an AI uppercut that rearranged our reality and knocked us to our knees. Here’s how pubs and their ad tech partners can punch back in the years ahead.

A new storyline is emerging around curation, one in which publishers feel they’ve lost out to middlemen on yet another opportunity to monetize their audiences.

Starting on February 16, Google said it will no longer prohibit fingerprinting for companies that use its advertising products. Oh, how times have changed.

2024’s most popular guest columns offer a snapshot of an industry in flux – and one that’s grown cynical due to repeated promises of unrealized change.

The IAB Tech Lab is officially rebranding its Seller Defined Audiences spec as “Curated Audiences” to spur adoption in response to this year’s sell-side curation trend.

Curation is a reaction to programmatic’s worsening queries-per-second problem, says Permutive’s Joe Root. DSPs are biased toward impressions that have an identifier attached, so SSPs are using curated deal IDs as a stand-in for third-party cookies.

Forget cookieless. Now it’s time for ID-less solutions. No doubt you’ve heard someone drop that buzzword in a conversation recently. But what are they, exactly?