IAB Tech Lab

IAB Tech Lab is the technical-standards arm spun out of the Interactive Advertising Bureau in 2014. Where IAB itself is the trade body — research, advocacy, the annual Leadership Meeting and NewFronts — Tech Lab is the engineering shop. Its outputs are the protocols the open programmatic stack actually runs on: OpenRTB for bid-request structure, ads.txt and sellers.json for who-can-sell-what attestation, the SupplyChain Object for hop-by-hop intermediary disclosure, VAST for video ad insertion, OM SDK for cross-platform viewability, and the Global Privacy Protocol for cross-jurisdiction consent signaling.

The body matters to a CTV/streaming audience for two reasons that have only sharpened in 2026. First, every dollar of programmatic CTV spend transacts on its specs — the bidstream Magnite, PubMatic, The Trade Desk, Amazon Ads, and the publisher-side ad servers all share runs on OpenRTB and is policed by ads.txt. Second, the body’s April 2026 launch of the Programmatic Governance Council marks its first attempt to write business rules above its technical rules — a posture shift that follows the Amazon Dynamic Traffic Engine donation (also April 2026) and runs in parallel with the Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) standards work targeting live-sports inventory through the 2028 Olympics.

Tech Lab is not a regulator and not a court — it has no enforcement authority over members who deviate from its specs. Its leverage is conformance: a publisher who does not maintain a clean ads.txt loses bid requests; a DSP that does not honor SupplyChain Object loses sell-side trust. The W3C is a useful comparison from outside ad tech — both are voluntary standards bodies whose specs become de facto law through buy-in, not statute.