Undermining Ourselves
How Advertising Keeps Getting Standards Wrong
Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust. Others have even shut down in the face of lawsuits claiming insufficiently broad industry engagement. Why?
Because we mistake the release of a proposal for the achievement of standardization and create more noise than clarity.
My standards journey began with IAB’s Future of the Cookie (FotC) working group, where I represented Yahoo in 2013, years before Apple and GDPR disrupted cookies. That group offered a taste of what the industry could accomplish together. It was a precursor to the IAB Tech Lab, which I later led as its first independent CEO. At Tech Lab, the remarkable volunteer effort and potential of 20 working groups tackling complex industry problems was unmistakable.
After 23 years in advertising technology, most of which I’ve spent working with and within standards bodies, I’ve seen why some standards gain traction and others don’t. I’ve also seen where we overreached, where we underestimated misaligned incentives and how we can sustain an industry that supports the content and services we all use.
