Over the last two years, IAB Tech Lab has developed several new useful industry data modules and the Transparency Center has evolved into much more than supply chain transparency. For example, it now houses the MSPA Registration, the SKAdNetwork ID List, the News Media List, the Open Measurement SDK, and many more. It was time for us to revisit how the portal was organized and better direct users to the resources they need to find.
Welcome to the IAB Tech Lab Tools Portal, your one stop shop for software, tools, and resources developed to support industry implementation and adoption of IAB Tech Lab specifications and guidelines.
The Tools Portal is now organized to group together industry resources and supply chain transparency data.
- The Transparency Center is a centralized repository for metadata about participants in the ad tech ecosystem.
- The Resource Center contains software, program registration, and more that support our standards.
The Tools Portal is a free to use resource where you can browse industry metadata as well as resources in the tools portal applications. All you need to do is go to https://tools.iabtechlab.com/ and register with your corporate email address. We have also given companies the ability to acquire this data to use for internal processing and analytics requirements via APIs for a reasonable subscription fee. Companies can acquire structured ads.txt data of over 10 million websites and apps including CTV apps via an API subscription for their planning and decision making applications. Or, a publisher could purchase supply chain validation service to continuously manage their ads.txt entries.
THE TRANSPARENCY CENTER
The Transparency Center was launched in 2021 to create a hub where Tech Lab members can view metadata around compliance, business identifiers, and supply chain attributes to better understand the relationships within the digital advertising ecosystem and get insights into their business partner’s capabilities and adoption of standards. The Transparency Center displays all of the companies that are compliant with Open Measurement SDK (OMSDK), Podcast Measurement Guidelines, Data Transparency Standard, AAM Digital Publisher Audit, BPA Compliance, and the IAB UK Gold Standard. This metadata can be viewed in the Data Explorer – Compliance section. The compliance data is available FREE via APIs.
In the Data Explorer – Business section of the Transparency Center, you can access corporate identifiers for the Global Privacy Platform, the Multi-State Privacy Agreement (MSPA), and the SKAdNetwork ID list. The Specification Adoption drop-down lets you search by AdTech Type, Specification, and Version to see which companies are using which specifications.
One of the most important, but little known resources that Tech Lab makes available, is ads.txt aggregated data in a structured format. We crawl millions of websites and apps, including CTV apps, multiple times a week to provide an up-to-date aggregated data set of ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json files.
Users can browse the data for free or they can subscribe to access the data programmatically. The programmatic access for this data has an additional fee to support the cost and maintenance of the Tech Lab crawler.
All of the metadata, compliance, business identifiers, and supply chain data sets can also be accessed programmatically.
WHAT IS THE RESOURCE CENTER?
Get involved with industry initiatives and products in the Resource Center. You can register for the US State Privacy Program, and the MSPA. As a mobile measurement and attribution service or a mobile SDK that uses SKAdNetwork, you can publicly list your SKAdNetwork ID as part of our centralized list for app developers. As a publisher, you can sign up for Supply Chain Validation service that alerts you to mismatches between your ads.txt and your partner’s sellers.json. The service continuously monitors ads.txt and sellers.json to ensure your data and your seller partner data match and are properly updated at all times. As a publisher or monetization partner you can download a namespaced build of the OMSDK for app, web video and CTV platforms.
We also invite you to self attest to a new free program in the Resource Center, the Specification Adoption Program. This is meant to answer the most commonly asked question of Tech Lab; what is the adoption of [INSERT LATEST & GREATEST SPECIFICATION NAME]. While Tech Lab can usually only answer these types of questions anecdotally, this program gives companies the opportunity to attest which IAB Tech Lab specifications and versions that they are using in production environments. It then gives others the ability to search companies and see which specifications/versions they are using.
This helps early adopters find partners to test with, as well as helps Product Managers gauge the industry adoption of various specifications in order to prioritize their own upgrades.
We hope that this helps to shed some light on the resources and tools available in the Tech Lab Tools Portal to help you better understand the advertising ecosystem and your partners’ capabilities as well as perform critical functions like ads.txt checks for media buying. Create an account and check it out!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Associate Product Manager
IAB Tech Lab