TECH LAB 2023 WRAPPED

We are already deep into 2024 planning, and we’re sure you are too. To help you in achieving your objectives next year, we’ve compiled for you a summary of this year’s Tech Lab standards and resources. We expect 2024 to be another year of massive change in digital advertising.

In the United States, we’ll see three new state laws relating to consumer privacy and digital advertising go into effect (TX, OR & MT). Make sure you stay up to date with the Global Privacy Platform (GPP) as a signaling mechanism for consumer notice and choice.

If you are an MSPA (Multi-State Privacy Agreement) Signatory, the deadline to integrate GPP is January 31, 2024.

We recently released Data Deletion Request Framework. This will be one to keep an eye on next year as this framework supports any jurisdiction with a consumer data deletion request requirement.

The Accountability Platform is about to enter public comment! It has been designed to enable technical audit opportunities that can be used to support the industry in audit obligations, investigations, and other tasks necessary for determining the responsible use of data. Look for more details in our upcoming press release.

Signal loss is the new reality in addressability. We expect to see more use of Clean Rooms and we’ve received so much feedback on the Clean Room Guidelines that we’ll also be working on more Clean Room use cases in 2024.

Tech Lab has entered Advanced TV. As CEO Anthony Katsur said in AdExchanger: “From the consumer’s point of view, TV is just TV. But from a technology point of view, each existing TV distribution environment uses different content delivery and ad signaling technologies.”

Linear and CTV industry leaders have come together to tackle some of the fundamental building blocks needed to help push the distribution environments toward interoperability. We’ve heard from the community and the message is clear – get to VAST 4 and get registered creative IDs in place for digital as they are for linear. You’ll hear a lot more from Tech Lab on this in 2024.

We’ve also pushed tried and true standards like Open Measurement into CTV. With support for AppleTV and Android as well as an upcoming release to cover HTML5 experiences like Samsung and LG, we’re working toward viewability coverage across all the major CTV players.

The elephant in the room, Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox, is making itself known. No matter what you think of the timeline, we anticipate an extensive amount of development and testing will be on everyone’s roadmap next year. The Tech Lab Privacy Sandbox Task Force is hard at work assessing the Privacys Sandbox’s feasibility and performing a gap analysis against fundamental use cases. The Tech Lab will be publishing this analysis for the market in January 2024. OpenRTB is already being explored to standardize passing the signals needed for protected audiences.

Speaking of OpenRTB – we’ve had a huge year of updates! This was the first year of incremental non-breaking changes instead of monolithic annual releases. And this beloved specification is getting all the updates to support the industry. From updates to video placement types to signals for ad refreshes, which can be an MFA indicator and video duration floors, you’ll want to keep an eye on these changes.

It’s been a busy 2023, a few more notable releases for your consideration:

Sustainability Quick Wins Guide – ways to lower your programmatic carbon emissions with existing standards.
We launched a Privacy Tech Workshop for lawyers and privacy professionals – We’re planning three more of these in 2024, so stay tuned.
ID Solutions Guidance – learn how ID solutions work and how to evaluate them.
Open Private Join Activation (OPJA) – This is the first in a series of Data Clean Room interoperability standards that describe a specification for activating matching audiences between two parties. It describes the process and privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) deployment for implementing a matching operation between two parties and the supporting mechanisms to use the output of the operation to activate a matched audience for advertising.
Ad Product Taxonomy 2.0 – a standardized nomenclature for describing the product or service being advertised, updated to make better use of tier one for commonly blocked advertiser categories.
Differential Privacy Guidance – learn what differential privacy is and the applicable use cases in digital advertising.
Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines 2.2 – we updated this guideline to provide better transparency on measurement methodology vs metrics and provided more detailed definitions about GIVT and SIVT.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a regulation that focuses on regulating Online Platforms across the EU. These entities often do not possess immediate access to the data mandated by this regulation. As a result, adtech intermediaries play a crucial role in aiding Online Platforms in meeting their compliance obligations. Check out the MVP specification, leveraging established standards, particularly openRTB, for the transfer of the necessary transparency information.
TCF 2.2 – The getTCData command was deprecated; therefore, vendors that currently rely on this command to obtain the TC string must now rely on event listeners to get the TC string. Using an event listener ensures that vendors always have the latest version of the TC string and reduces the number of calls that the vendor would need to make to the API.

We couldn’t do this without you! Tech Lab Members and working group contributors make all of the above possible. We hope you enjoy some much-deserved rest and relaxation as the year wraps up – because we’ve got a ton to do in 2024.

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