Opening the Door to Growth in Digital Advertising

In recent years, programmatic media platforms have revolutionized the world of media buying and selling. Meanwhile the missing piece in the personalized digital advertising puzzle – programmatic and dynamic creative – has been evolving much more slowly.

This is about to change.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently introduced a revolutionary new standard – the first ever – for dynamic digital advertising. Now open to public comment, the IAB Dynamic Content Ad Standard provides a detailed schema for how constituents across the digital ad supply chain should define each of the creative components and their asset variations within any ad unit in order to build and serve real-time dynamic content in advertising.

What does this really mean? Here’s a bit of background.

For the past few years, I’ve been honored to co-chair the IAB Tech Lab’s Working Group developing the IAB Dynamic Content Ad Standard with co-chair Cary Tilds, Chief Innovation Officer at GroupM.

Cary and I have long been convinced there must be a better way to scale creative in digital ads without resorting to the boxy, unappealing, hard-coded “one size fits all” templates responsible for so many of today’s ads – these same ads consumers are fighting against with ad blockers.

To find a solution, we joined forces with the IAB Tech Lab and a team of 60+ executives from some of the biggest brands, agencies, media companies and technology providers in the digital ad ecosystem.

Collectively, we had all witnessed what happened when the IAB introduced the standards for programmatic media. Introduced in 2015, the IAB’s OpenRTB 1.0 specification profoundly changed the digital advertising landscape, bringing unprecedented efficiency and scale to media buying, driving costs down and paving the way for a whole new financial and delivery model for digital ads.

It was, let’s say, Day One of the revolution.

And much like the IAB’s programmatic media standards drove the industry’s massive shift to programmatic media buying, the IAB’s Dynamic Content Ad Standard is laying the groundwork for the second revolution in digital advertising.

It is now Day Two.
Opening the Door to Growth in Digital Advertising

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