Interactive Advertising Bureau

amounting to this server-side shift.

As a result of Apple reminding everyone of how powerful the browser is, you have a lot of companies in ad tech as well as organizations like IAB Tech Lab saying, hey, we need to switch to the server and do everything server-side so that the browser can't actually dictate what can happen here.

All of this made me think of Game of Thrones.

Seb, Ronan, did you each watch or read Game of

Yeah, feel free, Seb.

Trust his

server, right? The IAB.

Yeah, I was literally going to get there.

right around before I made partner.

And he went to the IAB and we stayed in touch and I did some work with him when he was there.

We've been close friends.

He left IAB and is now a partner at my firm JourneySpark.

So he retired and then un-retired, if you will.

He really can't, he enjoys working and having an impact and I enjoy collaborating with him.

And I was part of the two-person team that wrote the first impression standard.

But I've worked on many, many standards through the IAB and the IAB tech lab over the years.

And You know, the IAB Tech Lab right now has a big initiative called AMP, A-A-M-P, that's writing the first set of scaled agentic advertising standards that help drive a lot of change in the market.

And there's another group called agenticadvertising.org, which has a protocol called ADCP, as opposed to MCP, that is writing standards for how buyer and seller agents and third party agents that are informing a transaction can interact with each other.

And when you start seeing the industry sort of coalesce around standards, that's when you know things are real and that they're about to heat up and get a lot bigger.

It shows up a little bit different.

And so one of the things we did was we partnered with the IAB.

And the IAB helped us create standardization within gaming.

where the impressions that we share out on like how many times a brand is showing up is now standardized with the IRB.

So that was the first kind of like reporting and measurement is like, well, how many times are you actually showing up? And is it something standardized that by a third party that is believable and that we can digest? So that's one.

making themselves in painting themselves to advertisers as a legitimate place to advertise, just like CNN or NBC or MSNBC or whatever.

I see that because I follow the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

That's the The IAB is the industry association, the biggest industry association for advertisers.

And Fox News is all over the place in all the webinars about supporting the news.

It's in our quarterly reports.

And this week for our research piece, I read IAB's State of Data 2026 report, and it's kind of a rough one.

So somewhere between 60 and 75% of buy-side marketers say their core measurement approach is falling short on rigor.

timeliness, trust, or efficiency.

It's more of...

It's not saying we know exactly what's happening, but it's kind of like being able to triangulate different things.

So that report that I teed up from the IAB, it specifically called out CTV as one of the hardest channels to measure well.

I think CTV actually landed before Linear.