Conversations about programmatic transparency are the industry’s equivalent of politics at Thanksgiving: Everyone agrees it matters, there’s disagreement on the details, and somebody usually storms off in a huff.
Now, IAB Tech Lab is trying to keep everyone at the table long enough to hash out shared ground rules – or at least argue their way toward them more productively.
On Tuesday, the Tech Lab announced the formation of a new Programmatic Governance Council (or PGC for short, because you can try and take the chaos out of programmatic, but you can’t take the acronyms out of ad tech). The group is made up of buyers, sellers, ad tech companies and platforms tasked with bringing order to what’s become a rather disordered $200 billion programmatic ad market.
The council is co‑chaired by OMD’s chief media officer, Ben Hovaness, on the buy side and three sell‑side execs, with one focused on the web, another on in-app and a third on CTV. Hovaness co-authored the group’s charter together with Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur. In addition to Omnicom, founding members include WPP, Dentsu, Disney, Amazon Ads, The Trade Desk, Magnite, PubMatic, Hearst, News Corp, Yahoo, Raptive and Mediavine. Any Tech Lab member is free to join.
PGC first convened in December and has already met four times with plans to meet twice a month going forward.
Guess there’s a lot to talk about.
Enough with the flame wars
The PGC’s remit is straightforward but ambitious, which is to give industry stakeholders a structured venue for working through recurring tensions, rather than letting every disagreement play out on LinkedIn or onstage.
The recent blow‑up over transaction IDs is a case in point. The fight centered on whether publishers should share transaction IDs with buyers for log-level transparency, with proponents arguing it enables verification and accountability and critics warning it could expose sensitive data and erode publisher control.
But that squabble didn’t just surface an arcane technical dispute. It exposed the fact that there was no obvious place for business leaders to get together and “sort out what we think the rules of the road should be for this ecosystem in terms of how the technical specs are applied,” Hovaness told AdExchanger.
“The Tech Lab does great work that’s vital to the ongoing health of the ecosystem,” he said. “But the technical component is just one piece of what’s necessary to have a vibrant, effective, efficient, trustworthy and scaled marketplace.”
Waste not, want not
As it stands, though, that marketplace is a big messy mess.
The Association of National Advertisers estimates that there’s roughly $20 billion in programmatic media waste on the open web every year, and only 36 cents of every programmatic dollar on average makes it to a publisher once all of the fees, hops and infrastructure costs are accounted for.
Take bid duplication, where one ad impression is replicated across platforms as identical bid requests, which artificially inflates competition, distorts pricing and makes it harder for buyers to see what they’re actually bidding on.
Bid duplication alone eats up roughly five cents of every programmatic dollar, Hovaness said, despite doing less than nothing to improve performance for buyers or yield for publishers. “One-sixth of ad tech costs are tied to this one bad behavior that has no benefits to the ecosystem,” he said.
Which is exactly the kind of inefficiency that the Programmatic Governance Council is taking aim at first, because the fruits hang low. Shaving even a few points off the ad tech tax would make a meaningful difference.
“If we could get the total transaction cost down to, say, 20 cents, that would already be a monster win,” Katsur said. “We’ve been at this for almost 20 years, and I think we can find greater efficiencies in the programmatic supply chain.”
Not ‘all puppy dogs and rainbows’
Given that “we’ve been at this for almost 20 years,” however, it’s fair to ask why this particular effort will be different from all the other transparency initiatives and working groups, of which there have been many.
Not that the industry hasn’t made progress through specs, audits and councils. But the recurring complaints about opacity, waste and misaligned incentives suggest the work is far from finished.
Hovaness argues that one reason past efforts have fallen short is that they were often driven by individual companies trying to dictate change on their own. The PGC is intentionally set up as a multilateral forum so parties from all parts of the supply chain, including the middle, can agree together on what “good” looks like for auction transparency, supply paths, passing transaction signals and general accountability.
The group expects to put forward a few initial recommendations within 90 to 120 days, with cutting down on bid duplication and QPS bloat at the top of the list.
The stakes are only getting higher, as more buying is handled by automated systems. Although the council wasn’t a direct response to the rise of AI per se, the industry needs to get in front “of all things agentic now,” Hovaness said.
Not that a governance council is going to magically fix programmatic’s problems, future and present. But it’s time to start having those hard conversations, Katsur said.
“It’s not going to be all puppy dogs and rainbows, and we’ll probably have some violent disagreements in some areas,” he said. “But we have to do this in order to come out better on the other side – or more dollars will just keep accruing to the walled gardens.”
