Talking TV: Tackling Advanced TV At The IAB Tech Lab

The IAB Tech Lab, which sets technical standards for advertising across digital platforms, has set out an ambitious agenda for itself this year, and likely to be of most interest is the work it has framed out on the advanced TV front.

There, the group is taking on universal addressability, reconciliation, and interoperability for TV advertising across streaming AVOD/FAST services, addressable linear and traditional linear TV. It’s prioritizing watermark technology to address all of those issues and any more that may arise, for as CEO Tony Katsur says, “It’s like building a bridge to cross a river that you can then take with you to cross the next river.”

In this Talking TV conversation, Katsur lays out the advanced TV road before him as well as other fronts — cross-jurisdictional privacy, post-cookie addressability and the programmatic supply chain among them — on which the lab hopes to make headway this year.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: The IAB Tech Lab has a lot on its plate. Earlier this year, it unveiled a five-part plan for its 2023 priorities, encompassing advanced television, consumer privacy, addressability, the ad supply chain and cross measurement.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. Today I’m with Tony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, to talk about the organization’s ambitious roadmap for the year, particularly the advanced TV Initiative. We’ll talk about how he’s trying to get everybody to get along to foster the interoperability that everything hinges on and how privacy and sustainability will factor into it all. We’ll be right back with that conversation.

Welcome, Tony Katsur, to Talking TV.

Tony Katsur: Thanks, Michael. How are you?

I’m well, thanks. Good to see you. It’s been a while.

Yes.

So, Tony, for those who aren’t familiar with the IAB tech lab, what’s your remit?

The IAB Tech Lab was spun out of the IAB almost nine years ago, March of 2014. Our remit is we are the global trade body that sets technical standards for digital advertising across the internet. We differ from the IAB in the sense that the IAB is, as most know it, their remit is the technical standards-setting body. We are akin to think of us as the advertising version of the W3C or the IETF. So, we set the technical standards and steward technical protocols like the RTV Protocol.

We work closely with IAB Europe on things like the TCF, which is the transparency and consent framework to comply with GDPR. That’s our that’s our remit. We are focused entirely on setting technical standards, technical best practices, providing, in some cases, software to the industry to support things like the ability for open measurement SDK. That’s our focus. That’s our remit globally.

And are you an accrediting institution?

We do certification against people coming into compliance with some of our technical frameworks like the open measurement SDK. So, we will certify organizations that are using the open measurement SDK that they’re in compliance with how it’s deployed. Our data transparency standard … we also do we also do certify compliance with our data transparency standards as well. So, there is there is some compliance and certification work that we do around our technical frameworks that we support for the industry.

OK, so there are five key areas of focus for your organization this year, and we will try to touch on most of them, but most compelling to our TVNewsCheck readers and viewers will be the advanced TV Initiative. Tell me about that.

Sure. I started at IAB Tech Lab in August of ’21. Shortly after I started, there was a lot of conversation around what is Tech Lab going to do regarding interoperability within CTV. The conversation really started around all things all television delivered over the IP protocol and, you know, the challenges that exists in the areas of audience. Interoperability is a real challenge. You can have two different audience vendors on either side of the equation — buy sides using one audience vendor, the sell side using a different audience vendor. How do you reconcile those two things?

As I started down that path, and working in the TV industry prior during my tenure at Nexstar, it became very apparent to me quickly that there are interoperability issues not just within the CTV ecosystem, but also in legacy linear television. You know, there’s reconciliation challenges across broadcast, cable, satellite addressable, linear and CTV, you run into reconciliation issues, you run into audit challenges.

So, what started as a CTV-focused initiative blossomed into something that we thought could transcend all television environments. That’s what led us to our advanced television initiative. And our charter there is delivering some technical framework, a set of best practices, to solve for universal reconciliation, universal audit, audience interoperability, creating strong anti-fraud mechanisms in CTV, because with linear television, you know, the good news is that it’s fraud-free. The bad news is that it’s always been a closed ecosystem, which is why it’s fraud-free.

The new world of streaming television, or CTV, is delivered over the internet. And, you know, there are issues with fraud and digital advertising. And if you if you follow fraud, fraud follows the richest economics and the biggest budgets, it’s television. Also, the fourth pillar of our charter was something that could also combat fraud as more TV moves to a streaming environment.

And then fifth was solving for frame-accurate replacement as the television industry moved to an impression-based ad market, which we were already seeing the early days of that occur even in linear.

So, how can we support something that was free and accurate from an ad replacement perspective? And also, it better supports the ability to do impression-based buys if you’ve got frame-accurate spot insertion and replacement. And what we settled on, I guess you could say what’s old is new. We ended up settling on the A/335 video watermark, which in the U.S. is governed by the ATSC. You know it came out of broadcasters’ labs. And as I as I delved into it further, it just seemed like the Swiss army knife that addresses those five needs of both, you know, legacy linear television as well as streaming environments. And what I really like about it is that this is something that could be applicable across all TV environments.

As more television moves to streaming over the next decade, it’s something that can go with this transition to the world of streaming. It’s like building a bridge to cross a river that you can then take with you to cross the next river. The video watermark concept is not something that would go extinct as more and more television streams.

From the outside, all of this looks like a giant Gordian knot to untangle.

Yes.

Good luck with that. Well, you’re also wading into the murky and turbulent waters of cross-platform measurement. This is obviously an especially fraught area. According to many people I talk to, we’re a decade away from a viable common currency in that space. What do you hope to achieve there?

I think that’s probably accurate. I would say we’re five to 10 years away from some sort of common currency across formats, display video and then across environments, the multiple television environments I just mentioned — mobile web, mobile app, desktop, connected devices in the home.

Now, there are initiatives that are currently in motion. There’s the cross-media measurement initiative that the WFA and A and 4As are focused on, and we’re hoping we can support them from a technical standards perspective and maybe even some technical frameworks in order achieve that. That’s going to be a multi-year initiative. And this concept of our advanced TV initiative is one of our first steps into solving for cross television environments, which may be able to translate into cross-digital environments and cross-media formats. But, you know, this is at least a five-year plan.

And post-cookie address ability and privacy is another priority for the IAB Tech Lab. What are you focusing on there?

We’re focused on really three areas. You can’t talk about privacy without talking about identity or addressability. So, first and foremost, we’re focused on compliance frameworks. The first one that we worked on in partnership with IAB Europe was the transparency and consent framework, better known as the TCF, and that supports GDPR compliance within Europe.

What we recently released last October was what we call the Global Privacy Platform, or the GPP for short. As many of your readers and viewers may or may not be aware, there are now five states in the U.S. that have stood up privacy laws. CCPA here in California has evolved to CPRA. The states of Utah, Colorado, Connecticut and Virginia all have privacy laws requiring various forms of notice and consent in their jurisdictions. Some of those have already gone live as of January. Others are going live mid-year. I think Utah’s the last one where their law is active. I believe it’s in December of this year.

The GPP is designed to allow companies to come into compliance with those laws across jurisdictions. So, an example would be if I live in the state of California and I’m visiting family in Connecticut, I need to be compliant from a consent perspective, both in the state of California as well as Connecticut simultaneously. The GPP is a protocol that will support that throughout the digital advertising supply chain.

The same is true if I take that same example, and I’m a resident of the state of Connecticut and I’m on vacation in Europe and, you know, I’m watching CNN or reading CNN on my on my phone, sipping an espresso in Italy. I need to be simultaneously compliant with the laws of Connecticut, as well as GDPR. The global privacy platform is designed to support that level of compliance.

And then what we’re going to be releasing next month is what we call the accountability platform, which creates a standard and normalized form of data exhaust around privacy compliance to ensure that consent flags are being honored and supported throughout the digital supply chain. I think any compliance framework without any sort of technical audit capability that can be used by regulators, that can be used by privacy advocates, that can be used for self-audit, I think is a paper tiger. So, we really need to have some form of audit, some form of standardized audit function deployed across the digital advertising ecosystem.

So, those are some of the key things we’re working on from a compliance perspective. Then when we start talking about things like identity, so that’s privacy compliant and then we move into things like identity and addressability. How do we continue to support an addressable digital advertising economy which is powered by the ability to have an addressable advertising ecosystem? And we do that.

We’re working on things like cleaner ad standards. We’re working on things like privacy-enhancing technologies, and those are designed in order to maintain an addressable advertising ecosystem while maintaining consumer privacy. So, things like our privacy-enhancing technologies working group is focused on things like multi-party compute and differential privacy and on-device compute concepts under the lens of advertising use cases.

Our recently announced Seller Defined Audiences, well, it’s been in-market for about a year now. That’s designed to maintain some form of addressable advertising solution that’s also very privacy-centric. It allows publishers to create their own audience cohorts that adhere to a data transparency standard without actually having to leverage sensitive personal information. That’s another means by which we can maintain an addressable ecosystem while preserving consumer privacy and mitigating data security issues.

Those are the other things we’re working on from an identity and addressability [standpoint]. It’s compliance. It is how do we maintain addressability capabilities through our privacy. And technology working groups are solidifying audience initiatives that we launched last year, data clean room standards. We just announced our data clean room standards two weeks ago. How do we balance privacy, compliance with addressability and digital advertising?

And amid all of this, there’s still more work you’re doing on the ad supply chain and the programmatic market. Is that right?

Yeah, correct. The Tech Lab has never done its own fraud research. We’ve worked with other organizations, other companies. We’ve read the studies that many in the industry have read as well. I want Tech Lab to do its first-ever fraud research, too, for two reasons. One, I’d like to see the data myself. Depending on who you read, fraud is either at 3% or it’s 90%, while it’s somewhere between those numbers. And I’d like to actually do the research ourselves for us to come to our own conclusions. We want to understand how good or bad the fraud issues are by channel. It’s going to vary. Display fraud will be different than video fraud versus CTV fraud.

So, that’s one reason we want to do the research. The other is we also want to do the research to enhance our own standards. What kind of fraud continues to slip through there? How do we enhance our existing standards? What are new anti-fraud frameworks or standards we need to create for the industry to combat fraud? That’s one area of the supply chain that we’re working on now.

And then most recently we announced our sustainability initiatives in terms of how do we measure the carbon footprint of digital advertising throughout the digital supply chain in order to create a greener digital advertising ecosystem. Those are two areas that we’re working on.

On that last point, how valuable is that measuring that carbon footprint and demonstrably doing something that’s significant on that front? Is that even possible?

It absolutely is possible. There are best practices from an ad operations perspective that can lead to a greener advertising footprint. So, for example, this concept known as lazy load, where an ad shouldn’t even be called — every time an ad is called or every time an ad is processed, that requires CPU usage bandwidth. There are servers involved. All that requires power and cooling that all that all generates carbon.

And so, you know, simple concepts like this concept of lazy load, don’t even call the ad call until I scroll to the part of my web page where, you know, the ad could be rendered, right? That cuts down on ad calls, which cuts down on carbon.

Another big issue is supply path optimization. In our ecosystem, if you analyze the supply chain of digital advertising, one could easily discover that an ad impression can be processed one, two, three, five, a dozen times for the same app, for the same ad opportunity. Creating more efficient supply paths is another way to cut down on carbon. Because again, every time that ad is touched for an auction or every time that ad is rendered for possible impressions opportunity that costs carbon. There’s definitely efficiencies to be found in the supply chain where we can materially cut down on the carbon footprint of digital advertising.

You have laid out a lot here in terms of what you’re prioritizing. There’s a lot of priorities. What to you amid all of this is the most daunting?

That’s a great question. There are two that stand out to me. Our sustainability initiative and delivering a greener advertising supply chain is daunting because of the impact it could have on the globe. You know, we have a carbon problem on this planet. I think the impact it could have on our sons and daughters, our nieces and nephews … It’s daunting in the sense that there’s real weight to this. There’s material benefit to the planet. This is something that’s bigger than the digital advertising ecosystem. This is something that’s good for the planet.

The other thing that’s daunting is the advanced TV initiative. You know, we’ve got a pretty comprehensive road map. I think we’ve got a really good handle on how to address cross environment, reconciliation, audit, data, interoperability. Everything I just mentioned is part of the charter.

I think it’s less a technical challenge and more of a business challenge. How do we bring in a somewhat fragmented television ecosystem? Everyone from the buyers and the sellers to the distributors to the supply chain vendors and everyone in between — the television OEMs, the broadcasters, the networks. How do we herd all these cats and get everyone aligned to this vision of having some universal reconciliation or signaling framework across TV environments? That is a daunting task.

Well, calling it somewhat fragmented is a very diplomatic way of putting it. And perhaps diplomacy, that’s part of the job.

Yeah. So, I’d say advanced TV and our sustainability issues are the two most daunting things that we’re going to work on. And we know both of those are multi-year initiatives.

Well, Tony Katsur of the IAB Tech Lab, you’ve got a lot to do, so I’m going to let you get back to it. Thanks so much for being here today.

Michael, as always, a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you. You can watch past episodes of Talking TV on TVNewsCheck.com and on our YouTube channel. We’re back most Fridays with a new episode, and we will see you next time. Thanks for watching.