Standards can simplify and bring order to a complex space. But deciding on what standard to follow can lead to a whole lot of conflict.
After some high-profile disagreements and LinkedIn flame wars last year over transaction IDs, the IAB Tech Lab is doing some peacekeeping. A newly formed standards org, the Programmatic Governance Council, wants to bring people together from different companies and with different points of view. The goal is to talk through differences before making decisions – or LinkedIn comments – that tear the industry apart.
We bring on the council’s leader, OMD Worldwide Chief Media Officer Ben Hovaness, to talk about how the group’s initial meetings have gone and its goal to stamp out unproductive infighting.
At the top of the council’s list is solving for bid duplication. Transaction IDs are one way to address this problem – but fully addressing bid duplication will likely include multiple solutions, including DSPs doing multi-bidding, or submitting more than one bid to SSPs. The idea is that a DSP sending three bids back with one bid request should be less wasteful than an SSP sending three bid requests.
But the problem with multi-bidding, or any other solution, is that solving for bid duplication is not a solo act. The industry will need to lock arms and take the necessary steps to solve bid duplication together, he said.
Hovaness estimates that bid duplication costs the industry $5 billion a year. It’s in everyone’s best interest to cut out this part of the ad tech tax and move on to tackling the other “mischief” that slips into the bidstream.
Beyond solving for bid duplication, a few other goals have cropped up in the group’s early meetings. One is solving for incrementality. Everyone needs better measurement, and programmatic will see less spend siphoned away to large, closed platforms if it solves for measurement. ID bridging will be addressed as well to ensure that IDs are matched in responsible ways.
And we couldn’t close out the podcast without discussing whether agentic AI will disrupt programmatic buying. Agencies can use AI to go from brief to campaign more quickly, Hovaness says. But he doesn’t see AI replacing programmatic, a move he compared to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
“It seems like you’re giving up the best thing about the ecosystem, which is addressability,” Hovaness says, predicting that AI will disrupt processes around programmatic more than the automation of programmatic itself.
