Interactive Advertising Bureau

The Interactive Advertising Bureau is the trade body for U.S. digital advertising — the convening membership organization for the buy side, sell side, and platforms that move roughly $300 billion in annual U.S. digital ad revenue. Its three durable outputs are the annual NewFronts (the spring presentation week where streaming and digital-video sellers pitch upfront commitments to agency buyers), the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report (the industry’s benchmark revenue dataset, now in its 30th year), and a steady cadence of research, advocacy, and policy work on behalf of its ~700+ members.

IAB vs. IAB Tech Lab — what each one actually does

The two organizations are routinely confused in trade coverage. They share a name, a New York address, and a founding lineage, but they do different work and have different leadership.

IAB (this page) is the trade body. It does research, advocacy, education, and convening — the NewFronts, the annual Leadership Meeting (ALM), the PodCast Upfront, the Creator Economy report, and the IAB/PwC revenue benchmark co-published with PricewaterhouseCoopers each spring. CEO is David Cohen, ex-MAGNA. Board Chair for 2026 is NBCUniversal’s Alison Levin.

IAB Tech Lab is the technical-standards arm. IAB spun it out as an independent 501(c)(6) nonprofit in 2014. Its outputs are the protocols the open programmatic stack runs on — OpenRTB, ads.txt, sellers.json, the SupplyChain Object, VAST, OM SDK, GPP, and (as of April 2026) the Programmatic Governance Council. CEO is Anthony Katsur, with a separate board.

The shorthand: IAB is where the industry meets and reports on itself. Tech Lab is where it writes the specs the bidstream actually runs on. When a story refers to “the IAB” without qualification, it almost always means the trade body — Tech Lab is consistently called by its full name in its own releases and in trade press that takes the distinction seriously.

Why we track them

Three reasons IAB sits inside the directory rather than as a passing reference. First, the NewFronts are the streaming era’s upfront equivalent: every CTV, FAST, and video-platform presenter — Disney, NBCU, YouTube, Samsung, VIZIO, Tubi, LG Ad Solutions, Comcast Advertising, TikTok, Meta — uses the IAB calendar to anchor their selling cycle, and the audience for those presentations is the same agencies that mark our coverage. Second, the IAB/PwC report is the only neutral, methodologically consistent revenue benchmark for the U.S. digital ad market — when a story needs a number for “U.S. programmatic spend” or “U.S. digital video ad revenue,” the IAB/PwC report is almost always the source the analyst notes pull from. Third, IAB’s research and advocacy posture sets the policy-conversation frame — its work on the open internet, signal loss, AI in advertising, and creator measurement is what the FTC, FCC, and Hill staff cite when pulling for context.

The trade body is not a regulator and has no enforcement authority. Its leverage is convening power and benchmark legitimacy — the calendar is the calendar because the industry has agreed it is, and the revenue number is the number because no one has built a more credible alternative.