IAB Tech Lab seeks to step up its standards-setting in 2025 with new tools for CTV, AI and a move away from web browsers

“A lot of [the releases slated for 2025] is in advanced television. Whether it’s CTV and streaming-specific or some of the spec work is targeted toward the convergence between linear and CTV from an advertising perspective. Another significant part is being driven by privacy. Those are the two big drivers of a lot of that work,” said Katsur in an interview ahead of the keynote.

Other areas of activity will include a tool for publishers to make their content available to generative AI companies’ large-language models via a new application programming interface (API), an API to standardize conversion measurement processes and a framework to curate the standards that could underpin the ad tech curation trend.

Here is a breakdown of some of the more notable developments that IAB Tech Lab has in store for 2025.

A more connected connected TV ad infrastructure

Live sports and non-traditional ad formats have emerged as two of the major trends in the streaming ad market in the past two years. And for as much interest as they may elicit from advertisers, there’s also a need to ensure the CTV ad infrastructure is able to support the two ad opportunities at scale. 

To facilitate ads in live streaming programming being sold and served programmatically, IAB Tech Lab plans to introduce new signals that can be attached to bid requests to pass information about impressions running in live programming, like sports. Those signals will be introduced for public comment in the second quarter of 2025 — likely April, said Katsur — and the public comment period will last 45 days. The signals should then be finalized by summer, just in time for the upfront market to be underway and ahead of this fall’s NBA season, which will include games streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video and NBCUniversal’s Peacock.

On the non-traditional ad format front, IAB Tech Lab will be closing its window for companies to submit CTV ad formats – ex. pause ads, ads featuring QR codes, etc. – to its “Ad Format Hero” contest(?) on Jan. 31. Then the organization and sibling standards body IAB will sort through the submissions to decide which ones to convert into formal standard ad formats. Those “winners” and the technical standards for their implementation will be announced during IAB’s NewFronts event in May, Katsur said.

A tool for publishers to control AI content crawlers

IAB Tech Lab is looking to develop a tool for publishers to programmatically allow LLMs to access their content. Called the LLM Content Ingest API, it “will give pubs more control and move away from just this open crawling,” Katsur said, noting that the organization has already started discussing the API with “a handful of major publishers.”

In addition to content, the API could enable publishers to send ads to the LLMs to then be relayed into generative AI tools’ user interfaces, with the possibility for the publishers and AI companies to share the resulting revenue, said Katsur.

That seems a little far-fetched, especially considering that the AI companies would have to support and use the API and that IAB Tech Lab has not had conversations with any of the AI companies. But maybe that will change between now and when the API is slated for release in Q3 2025.

A standard process for tracking conversions

Meta and Google have programmatic methods to track how ads people see on their respective platforms result in conversions on advertisers’ sites. Now IAB Tech Lab is working to standardize the process for other companies to measure conversions.

The simply named Conversion API is slated to be released in Q3 2025 and will be aimed at enabling publishers and ad tech firms to similarly count up who should be credited when a person purchases a product, signs up for a test drive, etc. sometime after seeing an ad on some company’s site.

A framework for ad tech curation

The ad tech curation trend could use some curation. Curated marketplaces keep cropping up, and yet programmatic marketers have had a hard time defining what exactly they are or why they are needed.

Enter IAB Tech Lab, which already has a set of standards related to curation, such as the recently renamed “Curated Audiences” spec (née seller-defined audiences). The organization is taking those existing standards — which also include Tech Lab Taxonomies, the Data Transparency standard and Supply Chain Object spec — and “weaving that together into a comprehensive set of implementation guidelines,” Katsur said. That framework will be released in Q2 2025.

A shift from the open web to trusted servers

Among the potentially more significant developments that IAB Tech Lab has on the docket for sometime in 2025 is “moving the industry out of the browser and into the server side for all things ad serving, identity signaling, measurements. It’s really about getting out of the browser,” said Katsur.

A pillar of this move is an open-source initiative to develop code that the industry can use to develop what Katsur called “trusted servers” that will be responsible for hosting and passing information outside of the browser. “This will be code that the industry can download and use and modify to their benefit,” he said.

“I don’t think we as an ecosystem can operate in the browser for much longer. As browsers tighten what’s doable in their environments, it’s going to become quite restrictive in terms of what you can accomplish in the browser. So it’s time to really move programmatic into the publisher servers,” said Katsur.