IAB Tech Lab Unveils 2023 Priorities

NEW YORK—IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body, has laid out its key priorities and roadmap for 2023, with a product roadmap that includes consumer privacy, addressability and privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), advanced TV, ad supply chain, and cross-media measurement. 

"We are heading into a transformative year for the digital advertising sector where interoperability, transparency, and scalability will be imperative," said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. "Tech Lab has a critical responsibility to ensure that the industry works together to tackle these issues head-on. These priorities ensure that buyers and sellers can effectively work together to reach consumers efficiently, placing privacy and sustainability at the forefront."

More specifically, the group said its priorities in each of the five areas were:

• Privacy. There is a proliferation of new privacy regulations around the world with an impact on how businesses operate and potential fines for non-compliance. IAB Tech Lab will continue its consumer privacy-related work in 2023 by expanding on the Global Privacy Platform, a comprehensive and secure consent signaling framework across multiple jurisdictions providing global controls. The international trade body also plans to establish a Data Subject Rights Signaling Framework (providing consumers the ability to access, delete, and modify their data across the digital advertising supply chain). The Tech Lab will also release the Accountability Platform, a technical accountability framework designed to provide transparency on using personal data for addressability for regulatory audit and compliance. Lastly, IAB Tech Lab will release a list of best practices and guidance for the privacy-safe use of other technical standards, the group said. 
• Addressability and Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). In early 2022, IAB Tech Lab announced the newly formed Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Working Group, inviting the digital advertising community to develop privacy-enhancing standards and software tools. This year, IAB Tech Lab will continue to facilitate post-cookie and privacy-first addressability for audience activation and measurement by creating a portfolio of privacy-safe addressability solutions, updating Tech Lab's industry taxonomies, and publishing technical standards for Clean Rooms, the group said. 
• Advanced TV. After spending 2022 analyzing converging use cases between legacy and connected television and understanding the trajectory of TV viewing and media investment, IAB Tech Lab released a multi-year advanced TV roadmap. Tech Lab's goal is to modernize the fragmented TV landscape and bring universal addressability, reconciliation, and measurement interoperability to all TV environments. In 2023, led by the newly created Advanced TV Commit Group, Tech Lab will work across the television industry to drive the adoption of an open video watermark standard, supporting technical framework and best practices to achieve standardization across the diverse environments and devices consumers use to watch TV. The Advanced TV initiative will enable the industry to achieve interoperability, improve measurement, and bring greater efficiency to a converging TV landscape. Additional use cases in the roadmap include frame-accurate ad insertion, cross-environment addressability, and universal reconciliation and audit while enabling viewability verification across TV environments, the group said. 
• Ad Supply Chain & Programmatic Foundations. Building on efforts to promote a secure, flexible supply chain in 2022, IAB Tech Lab will announce plans at this year's Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) to support a green, programmatic supply chain for all digital advertising media. IAB Tech Lab will also work to establish a secure and authenticated supply path from device to demand, a faster and more extensible Open RTB release process, and enhance the Transparency Center, while evolving industry support tools and open source projects, the IAB explained. 
• Measurement. Emerging technologies and new media formats in the digital advertising ecosystem are wonderful opportunities for advertisers to innovate. They also breed inefficiencies in ad delivery and fragmentation in measurement capabilities. The proliferation of devices, platforms, and channels are drivers of complexity and opportunity. In 2023, IAB Tech Lab will continue working to establish consistent cross-media, cross-channel, cross-environment campaign measurement and viewability verification. Tech Lab's ongoing investment in technical measurement standards includes updates to Open Measurement Interface Definition and Open Measurement SDKs to ensure continued support of all mobile/web video and CTV via the newly released OMSDK for CTV, the IAB said.