The IAB Shares its Roadmap for 2025

Last year the US digital advertising industry raked in more than $300 billion in spend for the first time, driven by the phenomenal growth of video across all formats, platforms, and channels.

The spend estimate, made by eMarketer in November, predicts that annual spend will skyrocket to $460 billion in 2028, as video advertising continues its dramatic growth.

For that extra $160 billion to come into the advertising ecosystem, the industry needs to unify around standards, adhere to new data privacy rules, deal with signal loss, and provide certainty over measurement, especially in the crucial growth area of connected TV and retail media.

The IAB has recognised these challenges and at the start of 2025 the industry body shared its product roadmap for the year, setting itself ambitious deadlines for a slew of new standards and organising initiatives.

“Many would say that the Tech Lab’s top priorities for 2025 represent a monumental roadmap for the digital advertising industry,” the IAB said. “That is true, but we’re also looking three to five years ahead as we invest in new foundations and building for the long term,” adding that it secured inputs from more than 800 member companies for its next generation of “technical standards for digital media’s new frontiers”.

These new initiatives are no doubt in line with the technical work being undertaken by media owners, digital platforms, and adtech vendors, who all want a more orchestrated approach to digital media buying.

The battle between the walled gardens of Meta, Google, Amazon and the open web advertising market will only intensify, while new media channels and the emergence of artificial intelligence-led optimization will also present challenges to all players in the digital media world.

At the IAB Annual Leadership gathering in Palm Springs, California, in late January CEO David Cohen said the digital industry is at a pivotal moment, with traditional certainties fading and future directions yet to be fully defined. He stressed the urgent responsibility of industry leaders to shape this future and spoke to the importance of the IAB Tech Lab in developing technology standards and tools like the Global Privacy Platform and Multi-State Privacy Agreement (MSPA) to navigate evolving privacy regulations.

Adding to that mix is the challenge of the post third party cookie area, which requires new approaches to personalization, measurement, and data management, and the shifting landscape of streaming and commerce, which, the IAB predicts will require innovative approaches to measurement, currency, and retail media.

The IAB Tech Lab said its key considerations for the next few years are: privacy regulations, data minimization and provenance, signal loss, TV convergence, the rise of ‘the everything is an ad network’ phenomenon, the rise of Generative AI, fragmented measurement and attribution, and ad supply chain integrity.

The industry body is aiming to deliver five technical updates in the second quarter alone. They include a CTV standardization initiative, called the Ad Format Hero program, which has received more than one hundred submissions from the industry, in a bid to enable further growth in programmatic trading of CTV advertising. This represents a vital step forward for the CTV space, as outlined recently by Brave CEO Amir Sharer.

“CTV presents a massive opportunity, but it’s also one of the most fragmented channels in programmatic,” Sharer told ExchangeWire. “ The supply chain is cluttered with multiple resellers, bid duplication, and non-transparent auction dynamics, making it difficult for advertisers to secure premium placements at optimal costs.”

It also aims to deliver its Privacy Lab in the second quarter to “educate the industry on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) applications in digital advertising and to experiment with what technologies work most effectively for each stakeholder’s business”, develop a Curated Audiences framework, migrate the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) API to the Global Privacy Platform API to transition the industry to one standard API supporting cross-regional privacy compliance. The IAB also aims to update the Open RTV protocol to enable large scale CTV live stream events.

Further down the track is LLM’s and advertising, a tough task given that AI licensing may have already bolted the gate, as witnessed by large publishers doing deals with generative AI content providers OpenAI and Perplexity. Still, the IAB believes the area needs technical oversight, as do some media owners presumably, as new guardrails need to be introduced in order to protect publisher copyright, and their ad revenue.

The IAB Tech Lab said it’s researching a new set of open-source APIs by which LLMs would only gain access to publisher content under strict publisher controls in formats designed for easy LLM and other AI model consumption coupled with an advertising API.

This initiative aims to give publishers greater control of AI crawlers, protecting their intellectual property and copyright and creating publisher owned advertising opportunities within AI environments. The industry body said it's looking for publisher partners to work on this initiative.

This piece was originally written for www.alikeaudience.com