The IAB Tech Lab’s new Programmatic Governance Council is the first time in the standards body’s 12-year sequence (OpenRTB in 2010, ads.txt in 2017, sellers.json and the SupplyChain Object in 2019, the Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) in 2025, and Amazon’s Dynamic Traffic Engine donation six days before the council launch) that the institution has built a governance layer above its technical layer rather than shipping another spec. The PGC formally launched April 21 with 13 founding members, a buy-side co-chair in OMD’s Ben Hovaness, and a charter naming “auction transparency, more consistent handling of transaction signals, and stronger alignment between buyers, sellers, and platforms” as the work in front of it. What it does not have is any direct advertiser at the table. That is the story MediaPost editor Joe Mandese published the same morning under the headline “New Programmatic ‘Transparency’ Initiative Excludes Advertisers.” The question Mandese put on the table — “transparent for whom?” — is the one the launch has not yet answered.
The 13 founding members named in the PR Newswire release are Dentsu, Omnicom Media Group, WPP, Disney, Magnite, PubMatic, Hearst, News Corp, Yahoo, Amazon Ads, The Trade Desk, Raptive, and Mediavine. Read the list as four buckets and the structural problem Mandese names becomes the literal seating chart. The buy-side seat is occupied entirely by the three holding-company agencies actively auditing The Trade Desk on programmatic fees: Publicis is not on the council, but Omnicom and Dentsu both are, and Adweek reported in March that Publicis had told clients to avoid TTD on the basis of a third-party audit, with Omnicom opening its own audit shortly after. The sell-side is Disney, Magnite, PubMatic, Hearst, News Corp, Yahoo, Raptive, and Mediavine: the publishers, the two largest independent SSPs, and the long-tail content-network operators. The DSP seat is the audited counterparty itself, The Trade Desk. And Amazon Ads sits as a founding member six days after donating its Dynamic Traffic Engine, the open-source bidstream-shaping framework that becomes the technical exhibit the council will likely cite when it publishes its first recommendations.
Mandese’s framing rests on what is not on that list. The Association of National Advertisers, which has been publishing quarterly Programmatic Transparency Benchmarks since 2023 and whose December 2023 Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study put the canonical “36 cents of every programmatic dollar reaches publishers” finding on the procurement-grade record, is absent. So is any direct advertiser — no P&G, no Unilever, no Mars. As of this writing, no on-record ANA response to the PGC launch has surfaced; the trade body that has done the most rigorous transparency-benchmarking work of the past three years is being routed around rather than partnered with. Mandese’s reading is that this is the central problem the council will have to answer to, and it is hard to read the founding-member list and disagree.
The defense of the composition is on the record from Katsur, but it predates the launch by five months. Digiday’s Ronan Shields first reported the council’s formation in December 2025, at which point he asked Katsur about the absence of brand representation. Katsur’s reply, per Digiday, was three words: “Their customers are in there.” The position is that holding-company agencies represent their advertiser clients in the room, so the brand-side voice is present in proxy. It is a defense worth taking seriously on the technical-governance layer where brand-procurement teams genuinely do not engage with bid-duplication remediation or QPS throttling. It is much harder to take seriously when the agencies in the room are themselves the active object of brand-side principal-buying scrutiny — exactly the kind of agency-versus-advertiser interest gap the ANA’s three years of benchmarking has been documenting against. Asking the holdcos to write the rules for the auction the holdcos transact in, while the trade body that has been quantifying the leakage stays outside the room, is the structural posture Mandese flagged and that no one on the launch side has yet engaged.
The waste numbers PGC will get measured against were ANA’s, not Tech Lab’s: the eMarketer-cited $200 billion U.S. programmatic market the council names in its mission, against an ANA estimate of roughly $20 billion in annual waste that motivated the benchmarking work in the first place. Hovaness gave AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff his own version of the cost framing on launch day: “One-sixth of ad tech costs are tied to this one bad behavior that has no benefits,” referring to bid duplication. Katsur, in the same Schiff piece, set the council’s aspirational outcome at “If we could get the total transaction cost down to, say, 20 cents, that would already be a monster win.” Both quotes are Schiff’s reporting and stay attributed to AdExchanger; the numbers are the kind a buy-side principal-trading desk could verify against its own logs, which is precisely the audit work the holdcos on the council are running on TTD outside the council. The council’s credibility against those numbers will turn on whether its first deliverables read as remediation of practices the holdco members benefit from, or as further codification of them.
Which raises an important question for the new council’s mandate: transparent for whom?
— Joe Mandese, Editor in Chief, MediaPost / Planning & Buying Insider
Pair the council launch with the same week’s other Tech Lab move and the consolidation logic gets clearer. On April 15, Amazon donated the Dynamic Traffic Engine, an open-source framework that lets demand-side platforms publish prioritized bid-request signals so SSPs can poll those signals and reduce unnecessary requests. Katsur publicly endorsed the donation that week, framing DTE in his reported LinkedIn post (paraphrased per PPC Land’s coverage and Schiff’s earlier AdExchanger reporting on the donation) as a foundation for “smart” rather than “spray and pray” programmatic traffic. PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel went on record via MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan calling DTE a signal “about where programmatic is heading.” The bidstream-cleanup tool is being moved from Amazon’s internal stack into standards-body shepherding by the same body now seating Amazon as a founding governance member six days later. Whatever DTE does for QPS efficiency, it is being normalized as the open-source reference architecture for an OpenRTB extension that an ANA-on-the-council might have wanted to negotiate alongside.
LEAP belongs to the same week’s frame for a different reason. The Live Event Ad Playbook Forecasting API public-comment period ran from Feb. 19 to March 20 and is now closed; Phase 3, the Buyer Instructions API, is expected later in 2026. Live-event programmatic, from FIFA World Cup 2026 through the NFL and NBA postseasons and the 2028 Olympics, is the inventory category absorbing the largest share of upfront ad-spend movement, and its named LEAP partners are Disney Entertainment & ESPN, The Trade Desk, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock. Look across the three Tech Lab tracks and the same eight or nine names recur. Disney, Trade Desk, Peacock, Amazon, Magnite, and PubMatic are setting the live-inventory technical specs at LEAP, the bidstream-shaping reference architecture at DTE, and the auction-transparency rules at PGC. The standards body has consolidated three governance fronts inside one membership cohort — and the buy-side seat across all three is the holdcos.
Two specific calendars name the next reads. Schiff’s AdExchanger reporting puts the PGC’s first recommendations 90 to 120 days from launch, late July to mid-August, while the PR Newswire release frames the larger formal-deliverables window at six to 12 months, October 2026 through April 2027. Watch the late-July window for what the council defines as its first transparency deliverable and whether ANA enters the picture by then; watch the longer window for whether direct advertisers are seated, whether the recommendations bind on holdco principal-buying transparency, and whether the LEAP Buyer Instructions API ships under PGC governance or alongside it. The structural test is whether a council convened by the body that wrote the technical rules can write business rules its agency members would not have written for themselves. The history Mandese is reading against suggests a high bar.
