The end of 2024 also marks Tech Lab’s self-reflection process. I know many hate annual reviews, especially writing about their own performance.
Secretly, I love it.
As a product leader, I believe reflecting on my performance includes reflecting on what my team accomplished. Were they able to achieve their goals? Did I add too much unplanned work? Did I remove roadblocks to help them deliver? We call ourselves a small but mighty team–eight product leads managing dozens of specifications used by thousands of companies in the digital advertising ecosystem.
We provide standards for companies in digital advertising to build into their software, making scaling integrations with other partners easier. As much as the product framework is the same, the delivery method makes our job a little different. Working Group Members prioritize the specifications, and collaboratively develop them. The specifications, once released, have to be prioritized within each company’s product roadmap.
We succeed when the industry uses these specifications to succeed.
And as I reflect this year on all the Tech Lab product team accomplished, I can’t help but smile. Yes, the team delivered ~25 feature updates + new specifications & guidelines this year. And that alone is huge.
We spun up new workstreams to deal with the hottest topics in the industry:
- Retail Media Networks: designing specifications to make product listing ads biddable
- CTV: designing specifications to scale the programmatic request and response process for streamed Live Events
- Addressability & Measurement: core system requirements for user agent platforms like browsers and operating systems building privacy-focused proprietary advertising systems
- Cross Media Measurement: unifying on a UniversalAdID as the foundational building block for cross channel measurement features
Even the incremental updates solved for big problems:
- Transparency: updating OpenRTB’s EID object and clarifying use of the buyeruid attribute to clarify when ID Bridging is used
- Privacy: Adding support for 9 more US States, and a specification for data deletion requests
This is only a sample of our accomplishments, but in addition to delivering features, in 2024 we also put a concrete focus on specification adoption. We took more efforts to educate the industry on the benefits of our work. This year we hosted our first Brand & Agency Event in NYC. We also started our first set of Lunch and Learns with Agency HoldCos– focusing on what buyers need to know about the digital supply chain.
And we’re just getting started.
Reflecting on 2024, I can only look forward to the future. The industry is in the middle of unprecedented change on all fronts: the convergence of linear and streaming television, addressability and measurement evolution in the wake of identity shifts and privacy regulations, and finally, continued innovation and emerging channels such as retail media networks and artificial intelligence.
Are we perfect? No. There is always room for improvement. We’ve had concrete learnings from every new initiative we tried this year, and after a little end of year R&R, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and dig in with the Tech Lab community. And as for our score card, for those of you who stuck with me this far–10/10 would recommend the industry use Tech Lab standards. 🙂
Jill Wittkopp
VP Product
IAB Tech Lab