The IAB Tech Lab 2025 Roadmap

Technical Standards for Digital Media’s New Frontiers

We heard from many digital ad industry constituents that 2024 was a watershed year for the IAB Tech Lab as we successfully executed 79 new initiatives. If the industry thought we were busy in 2024, buckle up because the IAB Tech Lab product roadmap for 2025 is here! Hot out of the oven, fully baked with inputs from over 800 member companies, refined and approved by our Board of Directors. The Tech Lab 2025 roadmap evolves global technical standards to address industry trends and outlines our vision to fuel industry growth, improve profitability, and mitigate risk.

The digital advertising industry continues to endure significant changes

The Tech Lab 2025 roadmap considers key market and consumer trends driving the digital ad economy.

Privacy regulations are genuinely global. They cover consumers in North America, Europe, and the UK, and new regulations are rolling out in Asia, India, and Australia.
Data minimization and provenance: One of the key pillars of sound privacy governance, data minimization and provenance, is under increasing focus from regulators. Healthy data provenance also ensures data quality, supporting brands to use data confidently.
Signal Loss expands as the industry ushers in a new addressability dawn due to privacy-focused changes in major browsers and operating systems and the ongoing evolution of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) incorporated into data clean rooms and trusted execution environments.
TV Convergence is happening faster than ever as consumers add more streaming video to their CTVs, and the TV industry switches to streaming with FAST channels, AVOD programming, and live events.
“Everything is an ad network” is truer than ever as new players ranging from airlines and grocers to hotels join retailers in the burgeoning commerce media network scene, adding advertising as a revenue source powered by robust first-party data and facilitated by shortened conversion paths.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) will create paradigm-changing transformations in all facets of how digital advertising works (Coca-Cola holiday season ads were 100% AI generated) and how content is created, consumed, and monetized.
Fragmented Measurement and Attribution of ad spending is still challenging as consumers diversify their media consumption between web browsers, mobile devices, connected television environments, and linear TV.
Supply Chain Integrity: Increasing calls for certification of standards implementations by the industry to increase reliability and integrity of supply chain signals.

Our Top Priorities for 2025

These developments informed the 2025 IAB Tech Lab roadmap as we showcase our top priorities, reflecting the most urgent industry needs.

Live Event Streaming and Programmatic CTV attributes: Live event streaming is hard. Showing ads on streamed live events is even harder. IAB Tech Lab is focused on developing the signaling in Open RTB and guidance for programmatic advertising to support live event streaming environments. Combined with CTV-specific attributes being developed for programmatic, these will become the foundations for scalable, efficient, and reliable buying and selling of live-streamed events.
Standardizing CTV Ad Formats: One of the first technical standardizations in the digital ad industry was for ad formats so you can “build once, serve everywhere.” As CTV continues its torrent growth, the industry is testing a range of new ad experiences in CTV environments, including picture-in-picture ads, pause screen ads, shoppable ads, “QR-code ads,” and more. Standardization will be essential for efficiency and scalability in delivering these experiences. The “Ad Format Hero” initiative was launched to support this effort, as the Tech Lab will standardize the most used and effective ad format specifications, enabling growth in programmatic trading of CTV advertising.
One standard API for privacy signals: With 14 enforceable US state privacy laws to open 2025 and six more on the way throughout the year, coupled with several other global privacy regulations, the Global Privacy Platform (GPP) provides the most efficient mechanism to manage the signaling and distribution of user privacy permissions across multiple global jurisdictions. Tech Lab will provide guidance for migrating the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) API to the GPP API to transition the industry to one standard API supporting cross-regional privacy compliance. The TCF isn’t going anywhere; we’re merely consolidating the API for consent signaling across markets.
Conversion API (CAPI): A conversion is a first-party event signal that a desired outcome has been achieved. Walled gardens have ingested these signals via APIs, commonly called Conversion APIs (CAPI), to accurately measure conversions and optimize against future outcomes. CAPI helps overcome signal loss in environments where the conversion doesn’t occur, like CTV, or due to environmental restrictions like the browser’s restrictions on 3rd party cookies. No longer the domain of the walled gardens only, the Tech Lab will release technical standards supporting a standard Conversion API for the entire industry and provide technical guidance on how to deploy CAPI, reducing implementation friction for all publishers, brands, and ad tech companies.
Curated Audiences: The latest industry innovation in addressability – curation, takes existing Tech Lab standards and builds a comprehensive solution. Tech Lab will develop a standard framework and guidance on combining four of our existing standards to build a scalable curation framework: Curated Audiences (formerly Seller-Defined Audiences), Tech Lab Taxonomies (content and audience), the Data Transparency Standard (and certification program), and the Supply Chain Object. This will enable anyone to build, buy, and sell curated media in an open, standardized way.
Protecting Publishers and Monetizing with Artificial Intelligence: As the use of AI, LLMs in particular, grows, AI engines need more content and data for accuracy and recency. This has sent large language model crawlers to ransack publisher content with little recourse. The IAB Tech Lab is researching a new set of open-source APIs by which LLMs would only gain access to publisher content under strict publisher controls in formats designed for easy LLM and other AI model consumption coupled with an advertising API, giving publishers greater control of AI crawlers, protecting their intellectual property and copyright and creating publisher owned advertising opportunities within AI environments. The Tech Lab is seeking publishers to work with on this initiative.

Focus on Adoption and Awareness

Industry adoption is key for reaping the benefits of any technical standard. Thus, developing industry standards comes with the responsibility of ensuring education, awareness, and adoption. In 2025, we will release several guidance documents, undertake over 30 education and awareness events, and research potential compliance programs to ensure the adoption and accurate implementation of Tech Lab standards. Some of the highlights of our adoption and education efforts in 2025 are:

CTV Ad Ops Workshop(s): Following very successful and positively received Ad Ops Workshops in the previous 2 years, we will conduct another workshop in the second half of this year to promote adopting CTV-specific standards.
CTV Programmatic Guide: The Tech Lab will publish a comprehensive guide for buying and selling programmatic CTV advertising outlining Open RTB signaling and capabilities for CTV.
Updated Privacy Learning and Development: Building upon a highly successful curriculum over the past two years, the Tech Lab is updating our popular Privacy Tech Workshop, incorporating the latest privacy frameworks and addressability technologies focused on lawyers, legal, policy, and privacy product professionals working in the advertising industry. The Tech Lab will host two classroom-style training sessions: one in New York and the other in California.
Addressability Solutions portfolio explainer: Cut through the clutter of all different addressability solutions with the Tech Lab explainer summarizing the utility and applicability of addressability standards and solutions.
Programmatic Auctions Explainer: To better support programmatic transparency and understanding between buyer and seller, the Tech Lab is releasing an Open RTB refresher consisting of comprehensive guidance on how standard programmatic auctions work in practice, creating definitions, a common glossary of terms and expected mechanisms of an Open RTB transaction.
Podcast RTB Guidance: Podcasting has seen explosive growth. According to Statista, podcast advertising will reach $5 billion by 2027. We will release guidance on buying and selling podcast advertising via programmatic using Open RTB.
Brand and Agency Engagement: As part of our adoption efforts, we will undertake extensive discussions with the buy side, highlighting how standards solve their most pressing challenges and why adopting standards is key to effective ROI for their advertising campaigns. This includes 1:1 discussions, on-site lunch & learns, and private buy-side events and webinars throughout the year. The Tech Lab invites all interested brands and agencies to connect with us to understand better the utility of standards in their media planning and buying
New tools and compliance programs: To ensure accurate implementation and assist the industry in faster and better adoption, we are focused on developing tools like live testing for the Global Privacy Platform (GPP), new compliance programs supporting the integrity of privacy preferences signals, and Open RTB supply chain integrity as well as PAIR protocol certification to ensure adherence to privacy principles.

Building for the future

Many would say that the Tech Lab’s top priorities for 2025 represent a monumental roadmap for the digital advertising industry. That is true, but we’re also looking three to five years ahead as we invest in new foundations and building for the long term. In 2024, the Tech Lab released 23 new specification updates. For 2025, we plan to deliver 31 new specifications or specification updates to power the growth of the digital ad economy for the next decade. Some of our long-term strategic bets in 2025 are:

Ad Creative Id Framework (ACIF): We will continue investing in ACIF use cases and APIs to efficiently incorporate the framework into buy-side and sell-side workflows to support cross-television environment measurement and reconciliation.
Privacy Lab: The Tech Lab is launching a Privacy Lab to educate the industry on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) applications in digital advertising and to experiment with what technologies work most effectively for each stakeholder’s business. By providing this test-bed, Tech Lab can reduce the costly implementation time for many companies to evaluate these new technologies. Test various PETs in the Tech Lab Privacy Lab, tune them to your optimal settings, and redeploy them in your environment, saving time and money.
Stop fraud before it starts – building device attestation into OM SDK: Using Privacy Pass, a cryptographic protocol, to power a new signal attesting that the device an ad is being served on is what it says it is. The Open Measurement SDK is already an industry standard for CTV measurement; integrating device attestation into the OM SDK will stop fraud in its tracks, as encrypted device attestation creates a difficult hurdle for fraudsters to overcome, further protecting CTV ad budgets against fraud.
Commerce Media signaling: As the Commerce Media craze continues, the Tech Lab will continue to invest in developing new commerce media extensions in Open RTB to bring programmatic efficiency and interoperability to commerce media ad systems
Content Taxonomy 3.0 upgrade guidance: To support new addressability mechanisms that require understanding user context, we will develop the upgrade path to Content Taxonomy 3.0 to help transition from older versions. Taxonomy 3.0 will help grow CTV revenue with improved context targeting and create efficiencies for all contextual targeting by reducing friction associated with free text fields and mismatched taxonomies.