IAB Tech Lab’s Signal Shift West Coast on September 25, 2025, brought together industry leaders in Mountain View, California to tackle the most pressing challenges in Privacy, Addressability, and advertising solutions for a world with fewer cookies and reduced signals. A highly engaged audience took part in technical deep dives, reviews of strategic frameworks, and learned about Tech Lab’s Trusted Server, different kinds of Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and the complexities of handling user data in different environments, including CTV. Here are some of the things you missed.
Trusted Server: Revolutionizing Publisher Control and Performance
After CEO Anthony Katsur set the stage for what the day would bring, we dug into one of Tech Lab’s major 2025 (and beyond) initiatives: Trusted Server. This open-source solution aims to help publishers maintain monetization and user experience while adapting to increasing restrictions in identity signals from browsers.
Trusted Server is an intelligent ad router deployed on the publisher’s edge that fundamentally changes how advertising works. Instead of multiple concurrent third-party calls from a user’s browser, tags and network calls migrate to the Trusted Server on the publisher’s edge. The result? Improved page performance, better viewability, and increased page depth—a true win for both brands and publishers.
Tech Lab’s Trusted Server Architect Jason Evans and Miguel Morales demonstrated the technical implementation, showcasing how the platform already integrates with Prebid Server, WordPress, Equativ, and Google Ad Manager, while maintaining full publisher control over data and monetization, with more MVP features expected by the end of 2025.
The roadmap is ambitious but practical, moving from proof of concept through MVP to full implementation of ad fraud prevention, brand safety, and measurement capabilities throughout 2026. Early adopters can already access the open-source code at on Github, and interested teams are encouraged to collaborate there, or to join the Trusted Server Task Force meetings to gather feedback and drive development forward.
AI-Powered ID-Less Targeting can be a game-changer
Two afternoon presentations showcased how AI can be used to transform targeting without traditional identifiers. Patrick McCarthy from People Inc. showed how People overturned conventional wisdom and found that removing ads actually improved ad rates when paired with better user experiences. Taking that a step further, and using AI to focusing on their content and the reasons why and times when users consumed their content, they could to identify valuable intent-based targets for advertisers that delivered results via their AI powered d/cipher platform, without cookies.
Melinda Han Williams showed how Dstillery took this thinking a step further, when she presented their multimodal AI approach that learns from behavioral signals rather than IDs. Their custom AI models can ingest any form of data—from CTV viewing patterns to mobile app usage to search queries—and apply insights across all channels. Williams pointed out that brand interest isn’t binary, yet traditional targeting treats it that way. Instead of the all-or-nothing approach of cookie-based targeting, she explained how Dstillery’s predictive bidding allows advertisers to target everyone while paying the exact right price for each impression based on predicted value.
The results are compelling: one retail brand saw a 60% CPA improvement when switching to predictive bidding across all inventory, including previously ignored cookieless opportunities. These two presentations demonstrated how the industry has innovated in the face of signal loss, and have fundamentally rethought targeting in a way that performs better than standard cookie-based solutions ever did.
Preparing for the New Era of Children’s Privacy
Amy Lawrence is the Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Legal, at SuperAwesome, whose business is built on advertising to kids. If anyone understands the risks and complexities of this area then it would be Amy, but she was, of course, the first to note that she is not your lawyer, but can be a friendly resource. She delivered an important wake-up call about children’s privacy regulations. The landscape is poised to shift dramatically, most likely to include raising and standardizing the age of digital consent, which currently ranges from 13 to 18 depending on the jurisdiction.
Also highlighted was a crucial challenge: mixed audience platforms will face “signal overload” rather than signal loss. With Texas and Utah requiring app stores to pass age information to apps starting January 1, 2026, and California’s AB 1043 potentially requiring device-level age collection by 2027, the era of “actual knowledge” is arriving. Publishers can no longer rely on the general audience exemption.
The recommendation that organizations should plan for is clear: expect that you will need to adopt 18 as the best practice age threshold sooner rather than later, remove child-defined personal information from bid requests, add age ranges to bid requests, and expect that content ratings become a key indicator of compliance, since sharing what the content itself actually is, would still conflict with the VPPA, as was discussed in the “Juggling CTV Privacy” fireside chat later, which will be repeated at I Want my CTV in New York in December. Above all, Lawrence emphasized that when signals conflict, litigators will always choose the younger age—making proactive compliance essential.
Making Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Accessible with the Privacy Lab
In an era of signal loss and increasing privacy regulations, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) have moved from theoretical concepts to practical necessities. Choose K’s Frederick Jansen introduced Tech Lab’s Privacy Lab, a new platform that will enable companies to test PETs like differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and k-anonymity with their own data.
The Privacy Lab addresses a fundamental industry challenge: understanding the performance versus privacy tradeoffs that come with these technologies. As Jansen emphasized, making data private requires collaboration and standards—there’s no “easy button.” The platform provides a common reference workflow based on the ADMaP standard and the soon-to-be-released standardized CAPI, allowing users to see exactly how different PETs affect their data through interactive visualizations.
With the global PETs market expected to reach $28.4 billion by 2034, growing at a remarkable 24.5% CAGR, the Privacy Lab provides crucial infrastructure for industry adoption. By offering both an interactive user interface for business users and an open-source technical stack for developers, Tech Lab is democratizing access to these critical technologies.
What comes next?
Signal Shift West Coast demonstrated that while the challenges facing digital advertising are significant, the industry is responding with innovative technical solutions, practical frameworks, and collaborative standards development. From Trusted Server’s promise of better performance and publisher control, to Privacy Lab’s democratization of PETs, to new attribution standards and children’s privacy compliance frameworks, and the Global Privacy Protocol and Data Deletion Request Framework specifications, Tech Lab continues to lead the industry through complex transitions.
Despite the specter of “privacy burnout” given Google’s cookie announcement earlier this year, it was clear from the enthusiastic audience that the interest remains, even if it is not yet the top priority. The message was clear: privacy and addressability are not opposing forces but complementary goals that require sophisticated technical solutions and industry-wide cooperation., But the industry and regulators are changing fast. Being prepared remains the way to not be caught off guard, and Tech Lab is here to provide education, support, and frameworks for success.
Barnaby Edwards
Sr Director, Product Marketing
IAB Tech Lab