Programmatic is growing up. Or at least it’s trying to.
The IAB Tech Lab has launched a Programmatic Governance Council, bringing together top agencies, publishers, and adtech platforms to try to address (seemingly unending) transparency and operational challenges in the programmatic ad market. Founding participants include Dentsu, WPP, Omnicom, Disney, Yahoo, Amazon Ads, The Trade Desk, and others.
Why This Matters:
Programmatic has exploded over the last decade, but governance hasn’t always kept up. The result is a system many would describe as opaque, with continued issues around auction mechanics, bidding, measurement, transparency, and quality. For buyers, that makes it harder to understand where spend is going. For sellers, it leads to friction in how inventory is valued and ultimately transacted.
The council will try to close the gaps by better aligning expectations around things like transparency and SPO with the technical standards that make programmatic work. As part of that, over the next 6–12 months, the IAB says it will roll out a governance framework focused on auction transparency, clearer signals, and more consistency across the supply chain.
There’s also a timing factor. As automation and AI play a larger role in media buying—even if it’s still early—existing inefficiencies risk getting baked into new systems. So, same problems, different tech. Without fixes, those issues will linger longer and maybe even compound in the agentic era.
Experts React:
Speaking on behalf of agencies, Omnicom Media Group’s Ben Hovaness pointed to the sheer scale of programmatic as a key challenge (duh, Ben!), noting that agencies like OMG are tasked with navigating a complex supply chain on behalf of many advertisers.
“Our clients expect clarity about where their money goes and how media is actually traded,” he added. “Sitting down with publishers and platforms to work through these issues together is how you move from talking about transparency to actually creating it.”
Discussing these issues appears to be the goal, as IAB Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur added, “Programmatic advertising moves billions of dollars every day, but too often the people responsible for it are not sitting together to deal with the real operational problems.” Discussion can drive solutions — hopefully.
Our Take:
This launch is really an acknowledgment that programmatic’s biggest problems aren’t new. Instead, they’ve just become harder to ignore given the scale. The coming together of major holding companies, publishers, and platforms suggests better alignment is at least possible, which hasn’t always been the case.
That said, the impact will come down to execution, right? The industry has seen no shortage of working groups and standards bodies. (I mean, there are several competing ones forming around AI alone.) The difference here will be whether this council can translate discussion into enforceable, tangible changes that actually shape how auctions run and how money flows.
