IAB Tech Lab is asking the programmatic advertising industry to weigh in on a proposed set of standard practices for how buyers and sellers conduct transactions.
Programmatic Standard Practices v1, released for public comment today, establishes shared business rules, norms, and principles for using existing programmatic standards. The goal is to create more consistency between buyers and sellers, reduce unnecessary transaction costs, and improve transparency across the programmatic ecosystem.
The proposal is the first deliverable from IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Governance Council, a senior-level industry group created to address business and governance issues in programmatic advertising. Rather than introducing another technical standard, the practices focus on how companies should use existing standards.
“Programmatic advertising depends on buyers and sellers having a common understanding of how transactions should work,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, said in a statement. “These practices are about making that understanding clearer and giving the industry a practical framework for using the standards that already exist.”
That distinction matters because technical standards alone don’t guarantee companies will implement or use them consistently. Shared practices could give buyers and sellers clearer expectations about how programmatic transactions should operate while reducing some of the friction created by differing interpretations and business practices.
The proposal is also an attempt to bring more formal governance to an ecosystem with numerous intermediaries and complicated transaction paths. IAB Tech Lab says greater consistency in how existing standards are used could reduce risk and strengthen trust between buyers and sellers.
Programmatic Standard Practices v1 is open for public comment through Oct. 16. Go here for more information.
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Constantine von Hoffman is senior editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
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