Progress has a common language

I've never met anyone who gets excited about standards. Until the day they don't exist.  

Every few years, our industry reaches one of those moments where everything seems to accelerate at once. Today, it's AI. Before that, programmatic, connected TV, retail media and the shift to omnichannel. Each wave brings new possibilities, new business models and new expectations of what digital advertising can deliver. 

That's what makes this industry so rewarding to be part of. Reinvention isn't the exception; it's the job. 

But there's something I've noticed over the years. The innovations that truly transform our industry aren't simply the smartest ideas. They're the ones the rest of the ecosystem can actually adopt. And that's where standards earn their place. 

We don't often celebrate the technical frameworks that sit behind digital advertising, yet they enable almost every successful collaboration across buyers, sellers and technology partners. They reduce friction, create consistency and give businesses the confidence to invest in what's next instead of constantly solving the same integration problems. 

As AI becomes embedded across planning, buying, measurement and optimisation, it's easy to focus on what the technology can do. The more interesting question is how we ensure those capabilities work across an increasingly interconnected ecosystem. The same applies to every major trend shaping our industry. More innovation inevitably brings more complexity. Shared standards stop that complexity becoming fragmentation. 

This is why the work of the IAB Tech Lab has never felt more important. Every major technological shift relies on shared infrastructures. In digital advertising, that infrastructure takes the form of open standards that define how systems communicate, how data is exchanged, how transactions are executed and how results are measured consistently across platforms. They reduce complexity, create trust and allow new technologies to integrate with existing workflows rather than forcing the industry to start from scratch. As AI accelerates the pace of change, these open, industry-led standards, not because they constrain innovation, but because they enable it to scale across the ecosystem instead of remaining locked within individual companies. . 

The work is already underway. The IAB Tech Lab’s Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP) are extending today’s advertising infrastructure so AI agents can participate in media workflows using the same trusted foundations the industry already relies on. The Agent Registry provides a trusted directory of AI services that organisations can discover and interact with, while the Agentic Audiences (formerly UCP/User Context Protocol) establishes a common way for AI systems to exchange audience and context signals. The Content Monetisation Protocol (CoMP) initiative is also creating standard ways for publishers and AI systems to negotiate access to and licensing of content. Taken together, these initiatives are less about creating rules for AI than about ensuring the ecosystem remains open, interoperable and trustworthy as intelligence becomes embedded throughout the advertising supply chain.  

I've always believed one of digital advertising's greatest strengths is its willingness to collaborate, even among competitors. Some of our most important achievements haven't come from one organisation having the best idea. They've come from an industry deciding to solve a problem together. 

The pace of change will only increase. That's exactly why the foundations we build together today will matter even more tomorrow.