The IAB Tech Lab will mark its 10th anniversary with a conference called “Nothing Changes,” which will take place June 11-12 and see attendees discuss the challenges ahead.
IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Kasser will kick off the conference with a keynote address calling it “the end of the beginning,” a line that evokes Churchill's speech and an interesting reference given that many view the 1942 speech as a turning point in World War II.
Ahead of the two-day event, he spoke with Digiday about the successes and failures of industry consortia over the past decade, and efforts to tackle the daunting challenge of complying with data privacy regulations.
The following conversation has been edited for brevity.
Could you please outline the planned procedures?
Anthony Cassar: Well, this year also marks the 30th anniversary of the first banner ad, but the next 30 years will look very different from the first 30. We are at the end of multiple beginnings. As I've said in previous events, I call this current era “The Great Reset.”
It's all due to changing consumer trends, the rise of CTV, the end of scheduled viewing, [the rise of] On-demand content, and we truly live in the age of mobile. We've been talking about the “year of mobile” for years, but after years of joking about it, it's really arrived now.
The situation is radically different than it was even 10 years ago, and coupled with the kind of “snack content” driven largely by the creator economy known as UGC, it's something people turn up their noses at.
What's changed is that a lot of creators today are making content that's really entertaining, entertaining, and informative. So you're going to see world-renowned economists creating short-form content. You're going to see scientists, other academics, and real experts in their fields creating short-form content.
You layer something like AI on top of that, and the content comes to you. I think that's the magic and the challenge that publishers face. [of the web]Consumers will search with purpose, seeking out content on specific websites.
AI has one aspect that has both good and bad implications: it brings content to you, the consumer, and it represents a sea change in how content is delivered in the past.
Doesn’t this suggest that control is concentrated in the hands of a few technology platforms?
One only needs to look at the data on where media spend has consolidated to see that over the past decade, media spend has consolidated more in closed environments than on the open web.
I think there's definitely a role for the open web, but I think the open web faces some big challenges, and in this space, I would encourage publishers, if your primary metrics are still things like page views and impressions, to rethink your metrics and focus more on audience and outcomes going forward.
The IAB Tech Lab was created to help establish technical standards, and Open RTB, VAST, ads.txt, etc. are widely recognized success stories from the past decade. What areas do you think could have been improved upon during this time, particularly with Project Rearc?
First, let's talk about one other success story: the Open Measurement SDK.
Project Rearc was announced with much fanfare, but it took some time to get started because it required redesigning how a multi-billion dollar industry operates, primarily from a privacy perspective. It took several years and a long time to gather industry-wide requirements and evaluate the regulatory landscape before I got here.
So I wouldn't call it a slow start, I would just call it a very complex and extensive requirements gathering process. If you look at Project Rearc today, this is the very fabric of the industry. We don't even call it Project Rearc anymore.
If you look at the things that we've released, the Global Privacy Platform, the Deletion Framework, the Accountability Platform, TCF 2.0, those are all just deliverables of Project Rearc. So we've moved away from that name, but if you look at the things that we've released in the last 24 months, like PET, those are all things that came out of Project Rearc.
Project Rearc [initially] It's a specific project within the industry to redesign how we operate from a privacy and data security perspective. It's no longer a specific mission, it's an ecosystem configuration, and I think privacy by design, data security by design, should be a conversation that we have on a daily basis now.
That's why I'm retracting the name “Project Rearc” – it's no longer a specific mission.
What are the other challenges?
Vast 4 [Video Ad Serving Template] It's not as widely adopted as we would like.
RTB 3.0 never really went anywhere because the engineering requirements included rewriting the RTB endings (effectively the ecosystem endpoints). It required a massive rewrite, which the industry didn't want, and there was no payoff from a product or business perspective for the re-engineering.
Seller-Defined Audiences has been a challenge to drive adoption. Is it a matter of timing? Like, two or three years too early? We've started to see a lot of interest in the last nine months.
But these are the three things we found difficult.
Some say the biggest challenge facing the IAB Tech Lab and each IAB chapter is balancing the interests of different constituencies. For example, you can explore various identity initiatives, but ultimately, their fate lies in the hands of Apple and Google. How do you try to balance these needs?
That's always a challenge. I mean, in every industry, there's an 800-pound gorilla. In finance, you have JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, and here you have Google, Meta, Amazon. And lately, during my tenure, I would say they've been collaborative.
While there are certainly differences of opinion among the giants of technology, I have been [in this job] And we've seen compromises made too often between big tech companies and open web companies.
