At our Signal Shift event today in New York, IAB Tech Lab showcased the proof of concept (POC) of “Trusted Server”, which is now available for industry review. Trusted Server shifts critical ad functions typically performed on the client side (e.g. browser) using 3rd party code to a publisher controlled edge infrastructure. The goal of this initiative is to preserve first party signals, enhance with edge cloud signals and put publishers in control of advertising on their websites to prevent data leakage. We invite the industry to join us in testing, developing, and prioritizing future work on this initiative, either by joining the Trusted Server Task Force, testing the Proof of Concept, or reviewing the code repository.
The Proof of Concept release is meant to demonstrate capabilities and open up ideas of what is possible with Trusted Server and its core concepts. We will continue to develop features, integrations, and use cases alongside the community through the Trusted Server Task Force.
Key features of the Proof of Concept include server side ad requests, prebid server integration, edge cloud processing for ad lifecycle, server side stitching of ad and managing all ad interactions in the publisher domain context.
Why IAB Tech Lab launched this initiative
Given the privacy related changes made and proposed by top browsers, it is clear that client side ad technology dependent on third party code execution on the client side cannot be sustained as it stands today.
- Browser based telemetry is tending to zero: Ongoing and proposed changes will steadily diminish user agent surface area and third party signals severely impacting traditional ad monetization models and yields.
- Need for better publisher controls: Publishers need better control and security over their user’s data and what happens on their website.
- Ad blocking is not going anywhere: Ad Blocking rates continue to rise worldwide and eat into publisher revenues.
There is a need for a new approach that is resilient to these changes and puts publishers and advertisers in more reliable and predictable control.
The Trusted Server does just that – it moves advertising functions to the server side and enables execution of third-party functions and code in the context of the publisher’s domain.
Next Steps
IAB Tech Lab has released the POC for industry review and feedback. The Proof of Concept is meant to demonstrate capabilities and open up ideas of what is possible with Trusted Server and its core concepts. We will continue to develop features, integrations, and use cases alongside the community and now invite everyone to help define the MVP definition that can be deployed by a publisher in production and easily plugged into the supply chain without requiring any effort by any other entity. We have some idea about what the MVP looks like beyond the POC functional capabilities, including:
- Addressability and Privacy functions: user/device signals, user object, context object, GPP string
- Creative Types: display, native (already used in POC), Video creative types
- ID providers integration
- Audience providers integration- curation, id less, contextual etc.
- Server side tagging
Please provide us more feedback on the MVP definition and other criteria like security, optimization, performance, data storage, prioritize edge cloud versions (Akamai, AWS etc.) and any other essential publisher side function which we may have missed in the above definition by joining the Trusted Server Task Force.
We have vision about the roadmap beyond MVP to incorporate third party services from Measurement and Verification providers, Brand Safety providers and others who perform functions to support publishers and enrich the bidstream.
Learn more here: https://iabtechlab.com/standards/trusted-server
Shailley Singh
COO and EVP, Product
IAB Tech Lab