The IAB Tech Lab celebrated its 10th anniversary this week with a two-day summit in New York City, where attendees discussed past mistakes as well as the challenges ahead.
At the start of the meeting, the CEO of the IAB Tech Lab said, “Nothing will ever be the same…” and meeting attendees shared their views publicly and privately during a period of reflection.
“Mandatory is hard for trade groups…” — Anthony Catulle, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, talking about the difficulty of convincing different sectors of the industry to create an alternative identifier to third-party cookies.
“If you're just shooting things blindly in the night and hoping for the best, that's essentially going to hurt your business,” Ashkan Soltani, executive director of the California Department of Privacy Protection, said in expressing requirements for participants in the ad tech value chain under what is being interpreted as the most thorough data privacy regulation in the United States.
“If you give us your email address, we'll give you a discount… and don't use two-factor authentication” — Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, senior vice president of product at The Trade Desk, outlined potential tactics publishers can use to encourage users to voluntarily provide identity information, right before pitching OpenPass.
“I think defining what a cleanroom actually is would be a great start” — Amanda Martin, CRO at MediaVine, on how data cleanrooms can start to come into their own in terms of helping publishers disintermediate ad tech.
“I think you’re going to see a shift in who’s at the table…” — Alana Laforet, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab from 2016 to 2017, reflecting on the shifting balance of power in the media industry, particularly as content creators (backed by the industry’s leading tech platforms) begin to rival publishers for cultural relevance.
“So from our defensive posture – from having to invest in Privacy Sandbox just to protect our business – we have to remember that there may be some incremental opportunities,” said Barry Adams, general manager at BidSwitch, as he spoke about how the Criteo-owned company is starting to look at opportunities from what many thought would be an extinction-level event for the company originally known as an ad retargeter.
“The open internet thrives when advertising experiences can be built in a very different realm than the walled gardens…” – Sincera CEO Mike O'Sullivan, speaking about the growing importance for advertisers to rethink measurement across the digital landscape.
From the bystanders…
“It's been great having the IAB Tech Lab around for the last 10 years, and I'm excited to see it continue into the next 10, when Google might actually kill the cookie.” — One speaker at the IAB Tech Lab's 10th anniversary dinner offered a witty retort about Google's continued postponement of the issue.
“A lot of money went up in smoke,” one IAB Tech Lab Summit attendee lamented Oracle's waning interest in advertising and the culmination of more than $2 billion in ad tech/marketing technology investments in the 2010s, when it acquired BlueKai, Moat, GrapeShot and Datalogix. The development marks the end of the tech giant's foray into ad tech and was confirmed in an earnings call this week. Digiday said concerns about litigation risk were a major motivator for the exit, according to sources.
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