The non-profit consortium, first founded in 2014, differs from its geography-based licensees of the IAB brand, not just because of its global remit but because of its mandate to establish consensus and usher in tech standards that can aid the rise of digital advertising.

And its two biggest challenges today — devising a technical workaround for the decline of third-party cookies and gauging consumer consent for behavioral tracking — are thornier than any it’s faced before. On a good day, ad tech is a multi-tiered ecosystem of competing interests. But Google’s decision to withdraw support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser in 2023 placed many ad tech companies’ business models in jeopardy, making IAB Tech Lab’s path to achieving consensus on either front a political minefield.

The dominance of Big Tech

The trade org describes itself as the “big tent” where all tiers of the online advertising ecosystem gather to establish rules of engagement; it expanded its membership still further in December, allowing agencies to join its board for the first time.

Its working model has yielded some accomplishments, including the establishment of the real-time bidding protocol, plus agreeing on standards over whether ads served were actually viewed by consumers.

But the IAB’s membership model also gives Big Tech players, primarily Google and Facebook, a place at the table (some would argue an outsized one) when it comes to formulating such standards. And in recent years smaller players among its number have grown to question whether they get their money’s worth in return for their membership dues.

Take, for instance, the protracted case of the implementation of the Transparency Consent Framework — the industry’s solution to comply with General Data Protection Regulations in the EU — which was driven by the IAB Tech Lab and its sister outfit, IAB Europe.

Google, easily the biggest player in the digital advertising ecosystem, stalled in signing up to TCF long after GDPR came into law in 2018. It took two years for the online advertising behemoth to implement TCF 2.0 — the original version of the framework was understood to have overloaded publishers with legal liability under GDPR — a two-year window that saw Google’s advertising business prosper while others faltered.

TCF 2.0 in question

Today, many publishers are still convinced that TCF 2.0 favors ad tech, Google included, as they are tasked with gaining consumers’ consent for tracking their behaviors online, before handing it over to intermediaries. These concerns seem justified, especially as the consent standard has recently come under the microscope from legal authorities in the EU.

In November 2021, the IAB Europe issued a warning to …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron