Release accelerated by donation from Subtextive
It’s official! The IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standards body, released the mapping from Content Taxonomy 1.0 to Content Taxonomy 2.0 earlier this week.
Because of the straightforward upgrade path this mapping and complementary mappings from Content Taxonomy 1.0 to Ad Product 2.0 provide, it’s now possible for the industry to move on from Content Taxonomy 1.0, which was officially deprecated by the IAB Tech Lab years ago after original release in 2011.
About this mapping
The catalyst for this release was a donated mapping from Subtextive, who realized the importance of a straightforward upgrade path to the industry. We created the donation using an AI-based taxonomy mapping toolkit we’re developing, in coordination with our taxonomy team.
After following their standard processes and protocols for both review and revision and following a public comment period, the IABTL’s Taxonomy & Mapping Working Group has now released the mapping.
The mapping itself is provided as a .tsv file in a format that is both human and machine readable.
You can find it in the Taxonomy Mappings directory of The Tech Lab’s GitHub repo.
The mapping is accompanied by practical and actionable guidance, accessible here. The Working Group will continue to expand and refine this resource in response to questions that come in from the community.
Nearly all categories in Content Taxonomy 1.0 have a mapped counterpart in Content Taxonomy 2.0. Hooray!
Only fourteen categories out of nearly four hundred Content 1.0 are without Content 2.0 mappings, which is not too shabby.
Even so, the Working Group understands that this situation is a potential blocker to upgrade.
My recommendation to you would be not to view it as a blocker. View it as an opportunity to go one step further.
There is coverage for nine of these categories in Content Taxonomy v2.2 with no other changes needed to the mapping being released. The silver lining is that you’ll then be upgraded to v2.2, which is only one release away from Content Taxonomy 3.0.
The remaining five categories can easily be retained if they are in use in your implementation, though they might not be.
Again, my heartfelt recommendation is not to let these gaps be a blocker. The benefits of upgrading are too great.
Why upgrade?
Weighing in at just over 1180 categories, nearly three times as many categories as Content Taxonomy 1.0’s 390 or so categories, Content Taxonomy 2.0 offers contemporary robustness that’s missing from Content Taxonomy 1.0. It provides more flexibility, granularity and coverage for effectively describing content for advertising’s use cases.
Content Taxonomy 2.0 also decouples what content is “about” from how and where that content is presented through the introduction of vectors.
Vectors are categories that describe non-topical aspects of content that are important factors for advertising. For example, we can assign a social media page about visiting Disney World with kids the topic categories “Family Travel” and “Amusement and Theme Parks” alongside the vector categories “Social” and “General Social” to describe the content channel and content type, respectively.
These alone are good reasons to upgrade.
Beyond that, changes are coming to the Content Taxonomy and OpenRTB. To be able to take advantage of these upcoming changes, such as improved support for “Genres” and gaming to name a couple, you need to move on from Content Taxonomy 1.0.
The first step is getting to Content Taxonomy 2.0, or v2.2 if you follow our recommendation, which this mapping makes possible. While you’re at it, considering adding support for both Content 2.2 and Content 3.1 will bring you up to speed and future proof your release.
Why now?
Content Taxonomy 1.0 is over a decade old. So, if you’re still actively using it to categorize or label content for ad targeting or blocking, you may be thinking, “We’ve waited this long.” Or, maybe something like, “Well, it still works for us.”
I get it. It’s challenging to do an upgrade like this. You’ve invested in commercialization around what you already have. Maybe parts of your system don’t lend themselves to upgrades like this. Or, your mindset is, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
Well, it is broken. Very broken.
So, at the end of the day, if your organization is among those who have been waiting to upgrade, you’ve been holding yourself and the industry back.
You’ve been making it ever-more challenging to maintain and develop standards that work in the rapidly changing and newly emerging digital advertising and measurement landscape.
And, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
It doesn’t matter what your website or marketing communications say about how innovative or bleeding edge you are. If you’re using Content 1.0 to support contextual targeting and you haven’t already upgraded, you’re falling behind. Your organization’s growth and market presence run the risk of being intercepted by any up-and-coming early adopter who has entered the marketplace fully equipped for the current and future-looking landscape.
Nothing lasts forever. And, that’s especially true in technology and advertising.
In the past couple of years alone, we’ve seen the interactive advertising space change rapidly along numerous fronts ranging from the rise of programmatic CTV advertising to in-game advertising to new ad formats all playing out against the backdrop of privacy-centered regulations and the taunt of a cookie-free future.
If you want the industry to be able to support the new frontier in advertising and you want to continue to be a player in this next chapter, upgrading is the only sensible option.
This mapping removes a significant barrier to upgrading by laying out a clear path for getting from Point A to Point B.
What’s next
The Working Group has also completed some important work around genres with the newly released Content Taxonomy 3.1. These upgrades are in direct response to the evolution of the industry and needs that have surfaced as new advertising channels have been introduced.
Standards are only effective when there is a critical mass behind them. It’s only going to be possible to get critical mass around standards currently under development if organizations still using Content Taxonomy 1.0 upgrade to Content Taxonomy 3.1 now by starting with an upgrade to Content Taxonomy v2.2.
Otherwise, it’s likely that it won’t be possible to upgrade to whatever is coming next.
So, if you’re using Content 1.0 to label or identify content to support contextual targeting, we’re asking that your next step be to upgrade so that you’re ready when we are.
Temese Szalai
CEO
Subtextive