With the cookie-less web approaching, at this year’s virtual IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, the IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising industry’s technical standards-setting body, unveiled new specifications and best practices for addressability, making them open to industry comment.
In the group’s launch release, the Tech Lab urges the industry to participate in vetting its proposed specifications and practices, which are designed to set a foundation for responsible ad targeting, measurement and attribution solutions, keeping privacy in mind.
Dennis Buchheim, IAB Tech Lab CEO, says, “It’s our collective responsibility to develop standards and solutions that put consumers in control. We must rebuild trust globally in the digital supply chain and, in order to do that, accountability needs to serve as the foundation of everything we do. This must be provable and easy to understand. Once that is achieved, addressability can be established in new forms, through a portfolio of standards and practices.”
IAB Tech Lab goes on to say that the specifications and best practices being released “are designed to be pragmatic, secure, scalable, supportive of marketplace innovation, and enablers of conformity to data transparency standards for publishers, advertisers, and constituents across the advertising ecosystem, whether or not advertisers and publishers are able to connect their audiences directly.”
Key components of the announcement include the Accountability Platform, which helps ensure that all supply chain participants can prove that they adhere to user preferences. It offers specifications for open, auditable data structures and standard practices to demonstrate digital ad supply chain conformity to preferences and restrictions set by users and the sites they visit.
Tied to accountability, Tech Lab is also touting the Global Privacy Platform specification which builds on prior standards to ensure user data is passed in a safe and transparent way. It addresses capturing and encoding regional user data rights and preferences into a standardized format that can be passed through the supply chain. The aim is to offer users reliable transparency and control and to support efficient compliance for the industry as the regulatory winds shift. The Global Privacy Platform plugs into the Accountability Platform.
“Predictable user privacy – across platforms and devices – can only be achieved through open standards where all stakeholders have a say at the table,” said Jordan Mitchell, the IAB Tech Lab’s SVP, Head of Consumer Privacy, Identity and Data. “This foundation must be established and provide transparency and control to users. It must not only comply with consumers’ preferences, but it must also consistently demonstrate that compliance.”
Two addressability-focused releases are also being announced for public comment, supporting separate but complementary approaches and intended interoperability with the Accountability Platform. They include “Best Practices for User-Enabled Identity Tokens” and the “Taxonomy and Data Transparency Standards to Support Seller-defined Audience and Context Signaling.”
Best Practices for User-Enabled Identity Tokens is a set of guidelines to ensure security and consumer privacy in scenarios when publishers and marketers offer personalized content and services tied to a user-provided email or phone number. The industry has been quick to embrace email- and phone-number-based IDs (whether used to directly connect publisher and advertiser audiences or not). To ensure that consumer identity and safety remains a top priority, Best Practices for User-Enabled Identity Tokens emphasizes the minimization of consumer privacy threats via encryption and layered, multi-party security to prevent unauthorized access and use, especially when passed to third-party partners to support addressability use cases.
The Taxonomy and Data Transparency Standards to Support Seller-defined Audience and Context Signaling provides specifications for ad-supported publisher content when no user-provided or third-party identifier is available, relying on standardized seller-defined audience and contextual attributes being passed within OpenRTB (real-time bidding). It opens up addressability for buyers using existing and widely adopted taxonomy and data transparency standards when there is no ability to connect their audience directly to a publisher’s.
“The release of these specifications and best practices marks an important milestone in PRAM and Tech Lab’s efforts to lay the foundation for the next generation of addressable media, and it validates Tech Lab’s vital role in leading this complex technical work for PRAM,” said Bill Tucker, Executive Director, PRAM. “Over recent weeks, PRAM has moved aggressively into the implementation phase of its work with announcements around our code submission process, release of business use cases, and invitation to Google to engage directly with the industry on the future of ID standards. We look forward to continued cross-industry collaboration to operationalize these important steps.”
To review the proposed standard and provide feedback, go to: https://iabtechlab.com/rearc.
