The Gold Standard and TV+ : our big bets for the future

The beginning of 2025 saw the release of the very first TV+ profile for the Gold Standard – our response to the increasingly apparent lack of cohesion for such a rapidly growing channel. Looking back at that specification now, it’s clear that we were yet to truly understand the nuance and complexity of the ecosystem, as we naively attempted to take much of our work in the digital landscape and simply transpose it over.

TV+ is not a linear channel, but neither is it completely digital. The dividing lines are blurred, and as a result it’s important that we consider where we can transfer over existing practices and where we need to develop bespoke protocols. This was the guiding principle during the process of updating the TV+ profile of the Gold Standard earlier this year, as we attempted to create a specification not only better tailored to the realities of digital TV, but also more ambitious in trying to move the industry in a positive direction.

One of the pillars of the Gold Standard is ad quality, and for this we’ve traditionally leant heavily on the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry-wide initiative established in 2016 that advised against using particular ad formats considered too intrusive to the user experience. TV+ is in a far more experimental phase however, with new formats still being developed and tested. For the Gold Standard, this means our role is less about determining the quality of these formats, and more about helping establish a common set of parameters so advertisers can seamlessly traffic the same creative across multiple channels. Accordingly, we’ve introduced a requirement for our Gold Standard members to make sure any ad slots they are working with or are responsible for are compliant with IAB Tech Lab’s Ad Format Guidelines for Digital Video and CTV. It’s fair to say that these guidelines are very broad and accessible, but we see them as a good first step towards a more standardised TV+ user experience.

On a similar vein, we’re also requiring that our members use IAB Tech Lab’s Ad Product or Content Taxonomies wherever possible. These are already fairly standard in digital TV, but we felt it was important to further codify their usage and hopefully establish a foundation that we can build upon in the future. It’s fair to say that during our stakeholder consultations we heard a good deal of concern about these taxonomies, with reasonable doubts raised about whether or not the complexities of linear TV are properly represented. While we agree that it’s an important conversation to have, we don’t want to put the cart before the horse here – let’s ensure that everyone is labelling their content correctly and then we can talk about whether we need more labels. This is another principle that came to govern this project; recognising when the industry needed to establish a baseline approach before more complex questions could be considered.

On that note, we also included a requirement for supporting VAST as another means to establish a foundation within TV+. Adoption rates for VAST are already very high, but inclusion in the specification hopefully helps to cement it further and acts as an awareness tool for those transitioning in to digital from linear. Much like the taxonomies, we considered advocating for a more advanced version of VAST, but felt that it wasn’t tenable just yet. However, what emerged as a best-of-both-worlds solution was the VAST CTV Addendum, a framework developed in 2024 to add specific digital TV capabilities to VAST regardless of the version used. This perfectly fitted our methodology as it builds on a digital foundations, includes changes to make it more catered towards TV+, and does not come with a significant implementation burden.

These requirements establish a solid level of groundwork for the industry but it wouldn’t be accurate to label these as ambitious. So here are our two ‘big bets’ for digital TV and how we hope to promote them with the Gold Standard.

The first is IAB Tech Lab’s Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF), a system that essentially takes the existing ad registry system present in linear TV and transposes it into the digital environment. Fittingly, much of the technical support for this system is packaged with the VAST CTV Addendum, making widespread adoption of this framework more an awareness problem rather than a development one. Many of the concerns we hear from our TV+ members surround the lack of signals and metadata, leading to a rather opaque system for advertisers and content owners to participate in. ACIF can act as a remedy to many of these concerns by having advertisers register their creatives prior to their campaigns launching, providing them with a creative ID that can then be transmitted down the supply chain. This ‘UniversalAdID’ – as it appears in the specs – can then be utilised by advertisers in order to help reconcile reports from a variety of different platforms. For downstream vendors, the creative ID can likewise help with performance reconciliation, but it can also be used to retrieve additional metadata from the corresponding ad registry. Altogether, ACIF adds a layer of transparency to the ecosystem, increasing trust across the supply chain and unlocking a higher level of measurement.

We’ve had very positive feedback from stakeholders in the industry when talking to them about ACIF, but it is worth acknowledging that it will require a significant level of uptake in order to be truly effective. Add to this the fact that support for ACIF has only recently been launched by Clearcast, the UK’s ad registry, and you can begin to appreciate the extent of work needed to help the framework reach maturity. Despite this, we strongly believe that the benefits of ACIF as well as its foundation as a linear process adapted for the digital market make it a must-have for the industry. As such, we’re requiring that our TV+ Gold Standard members support ACIF however possible, whether than be by simply passing the creative ID or by going through the registration process itself. This is undoubtedly going to be a tough pill to swallow for digital-native companies, as the concept of registering an ad has never existed in and could even be seen as antithetical to the open, programmatic system that they’re accustomed to. Nevertheless, this is a great opportunity to efficiently assuage many of the critical pain points in digital TV and so we’re committed to raising awareness and understanding of ACIF for the foreseeable future.

The second big bet is the Open Measurement SDK (OM SDK), again from IAB Tech Lab. Simply put, the OM SDK provides a standard method of delivering basic reporting signals from content owners to verification providers; again affording a level of transparency but also improving interoperability in the ecosystem. Our primary focus here is once again measurement, particularly on helping the buy side to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns. We’ve heard comments from our buy-side members that due in part to the numerous divergent signals and reports that digital TV platforms provide, they are not particularly confident that their ads are appearing on the correct device, playing sound, or even appearing on the screen at all. While TV+ may be the talk of the town right now, neglecting to give buyers these basic assurances could lead to ad spend being diverted elsewhere in the near future. The OM SDK can help solve these issues, which in turn should ensure that the buy side retains their high level of trust in digital TV as a premium advertising channel.

For anybody familiar with the solution, this may not seem particularly ambitious considering that the OM SDK already has a high level of uptake in display and mobile platforms. However, a critical learning for us over the last year or so is that TV+ encompasses such a wide range of platforms and structures that implementing one framework can come with an array of caveats. As a result, we’ve had a significant amount of pushback from some of our members not due to the OM SDK itself, but instead due to the development time that would be needed in order to implement it. This has put us in a tricky situation. There is clearly a lot of value in the widespread adoption of the OM SDK, but we don’t want to hamper the overall effectiveness of the Gold Standard with a solution that the majority of companies don’t feel they can actualise in the near future. The result is a compromise – a requirement not around implementing the OM SDK but rather of conducting a review of the initiative and the benefits it could entail. This is admittedly somewhat half-hearted, but we believe there’s still value in spreading awareness of the OM SDK now such that we can potentially mandate compliance in the future.

As an addition to our existing requirements around ads.txt, scam ads and responsible data management, we believe that we’ve established an ambitious specification that can help drive standardisation across TV+, making the ecosystem healthier and more sustainable. There’s still a lot of work to be done in publicising many of these practices but we’ve been delighted with the current response to this new version of the Gold Standard, particularly from other industry bodies. We’ll be continuing to focus on digital TV throughout 2026; via the Gold Standard, our TV+ community, our training courses – all culminating in our TV+ Growth Summit in November.

If you’d like to learn more about the TV+ profile of the Gold Standard or more generally about our work in digital TV, please get in touch at [email protected] or [email protected].