Hundreds of programmatic and ad tech professionals gathered together at the IAB's Ad Tech Impact conference on a day when the word "apocalypse" was uttered by almost every attendee. Thankfully, they were referring to the eeriness of Manhattan during one of the worst air quality days in history, a consequence of Canadian wildfires, which left the city looking like the Divine had decided to use a Sepia filter. While the same word may have been used for the valuation of ad tech companies over the past year, the mood at the conference was upbeat and voraciously inquisitive around topics like global privacy compliance, the rise of AI and the end of the cookie.
In his opening remarks, IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur (pictured below) outlined the number of accomplishments that have been achieved by Tech Lab over the past year and provided a sneak peek into what they are looking to release going forward. The exhaustive list of the past year was impressive and included accomplishments such as the creation of clean room ad standards, which, Katsur said, "wasn't even on our roadmap at this time last year" but was added as a priority in response to market demand and the release of the Global Privacy Platform (GPP), a universal signaling protocol "intended to carry privacy signaling starting with compliance signals across multiple jurisdictions, across the globe." Other areas of focus have been an open measurement SDK for Connected TV and a sustainability playbook as the carbon impact of digital advertising has become a major industry topic over the past few months.
As traditional linear TV fades and blends into an ever-increasing digital interactive video ecosystem, the IAB Tech Lab is now prioritizing Advanced TV standards. This week, the IAB Tech Lab announced the formation of the Advanced TV Commit Group which counts Paramount, NBC Universal, Warner Bros Discovery, Extreme Reach, EW Scripps, the VAB, Experi, Publica, Nielsen and GroupM as inaugural members. The new group's mission is to ensure the interoperability and standardization of all TV environments in terms of advertising addressability. The Advanced TV Commit Group will focus on areas such as holistic reconciliation, a unified measurement framework and consistent ad experiences between TV and digital advertising experiences.
Looking forward, Katsur explained that the IAB will continue to update clean room standards, evolve telemetry data to measure the carbon impact of digital advertising and recommend new efficiencies of the digital supply chain, expand the open measurement SDK to addition TV OEMs, publish ID solution technical guidance and release device attestation technical standards to combat ad fraud.
Meta's Research Scientist on AI, Angela Fan, brought everyone up to speed on how AI has evolved and how Meta is committed to Responsible AI. Fan explained that Meta is collaborating with outside experts and different regulators and has made a big push to hire "a lot of interdisciplinary experts." Fan herself has on-boarded linguists, sociologists and ethicists to her team.to "understand our work more holistically." She noted that, to date, Meta has invested more than $90mm in AI CAPEX and intends to invest an additional $30mm this year.
Following Fan's presentation, she joined a panel moderated by Mindshare's Michael Palmer on the impact AI is having on the advertising business. The panel also featured Dan Taylor, Vice President of Global Ads at Google, and Neil Richter, Director of Advertiser Science at Amazon. Taylor noted that the industry is quickly adopting this next level of AI, pointing to a recent partnership announcement between WPP and Nvidia Omniverse with AI, which will enable advertising creatives at WPP to produce high-quality ad content more efficiently and at scale, while adhering to brand guidelines.
Taylor expressed optimism that AI will bring far superior signal listening in programmatic media buying and bidding. Richter sees the advancements in AI benefiting publishers who will gain a much better content recognition system, improving their audience strategy. He believes that, for those publishers who were unable to afford an in-house data team, AI will "hold state" and for the buy side, "optimization is going to clearly improve maybe to the point that customers can let their hands off the algorithm."
Other notable moments included a discussion with Kanishk Prasad, Director of Product at The Trade Desk, around Unified ID Solution 2.0 (UID2) where Prasad admitted that, while great strides have been made in CTV, audio and some other channels, "when it comes to the web, not everyone will have a UID2 or other identifier" -- but in conjunction with other data, UID2 is still an important factor. A discussion around the movement to direct supply paths had representatives of The Trade Desk and PubMatic prognosticating that there will continue to be a shakeout in the SSP space due to marketplace maturation, efficiencies and sustainability concerns.
Will Doherty, Vice President, Inventory Development at The Trade Desk predicted that the Supply Chain "will start to orient itself around a different economic model" where there will be "extraordinarily high volume" but much lower margins. "We are just in the middle of a big shift,">