A picture is worth a thousand words
Everyone in the digital supply chain alike wants to be recognized for the work they do to comply with industry standards. Buyers, sellers, adtech companies. It gives buyers a sense of security in how operations are performed, and it sets sellers apart from the competition.
While the IAB Tech Lab doesn’t have a compliance program for every standard, the ones we do are critical to get right. Open Measurement, Podcast Measurement, and Data Transparency are compliance programs that require nuanced integration and roll up into larger scale industry initiatives, such as impression measurement.
We have recently enhanced how we recognize compliant companies, as outlined in this video, or in the rest of this article below.
What does Tech Lab compliance mean?
Tech Lab compliance programs exercise the integration of the standards. As an example, Open Measurement is a software development kit (SDK) that needs to be integrated into an ads SDK or publisher adtech stack. As with any software integration, there are a set of outcomes expected and a set of tests that can be executed to ensure the integration was successful.
Once an integrator passes Compliance Certification they need a way to share the news with the industry! We’re pleased to announce we’ve rolled out a new, more secure, way to receive and display your compliance seal badge!
In the past, the IAB Tech Lab has sent out an image version of our compliance seal for the certified company to display on their site. While this was simple to display, it wasn’t secure. It was susceptible to being copied or left on webpages after a company’s compliance for a product had expired. This made it difficult to trust the value of the compliance badge.
Going forward, a company completing compliance will receive a piece of javascript code to embed on their webpage. The IAB Tech Lab Compliance Team will manage the badge display. If they have gone out of compliance, the badge will change to reflect their compliance status. This change means the industry can trust the signal provided by the compliance badge. The badge means that a company has completed a compliance program and the tests have been successfully exercised to show adherence to the standard(s) they are certified in. The badge can be verified by its link back to the companies compliance log in the IAB Tech Lab Tools Portal. This new method of compliance badge deployment will start with each company’s upcoming compliance renewal if you are an existing compliant company. All new certifications will be handled in this manner from November 2024.
We’re excited to bring this seemingly small change to the industry, to help promote trust and transparency in the Tech Lab Compliance Programs.
Katie Shell
Associate Product Manager
IAB Tech Lab