Anthony Katsur

Anthony Katsur runs the engineering shop that the open programmatic stack runs on. As CEO of IAB Tech Lab since August 2021, he sits at the intersection of three forces simultaneously rewriting ad tech: privacy-driven signal loss, AI-driven content ingestion (and AI-driven inventory creation), and a Big Tech ecosystem that increasingly behaves like the regulator the FTC isn’t.

His prior 25 years explain why he got the seat. Katsur came up through DoubleClick after its acquisition of NetGravity in the late 1990s — the formative ad-server era — then ran ad-tech operating roles across the buy and sell sides: COO and then CEO of publisher-optimization firm Maxifier, leadership at MediaMath, SVP of Business Operations and GM of Buyer Cloud at Rubicon Project (now Magnite), President at Sonobi, and SVP of Digital Strategy at Nexstar before joining the standards body. He has, in other words, sat in nearly every chair the Tech Lab now writes specs for.

Under his tenure the body has shifted posture. Through 2024, IAB Tech Lab was primarily a technical-specs organization — OpenRTB versions, ads.txt updates, VAST iterations. From 2025 forward — Trusted Server, the Ad Creative ID Framework, the Global Privacy Protocol, the Containerization Initiative, the LLM Content Ingest API, the Agentic Advertising Management Protocols, and in April 2026 the Programmatic Governance Council — Katsur has pushed the body into governance, content-rights, and AI-mediated commerce territory it had previously avoided. Whether that scope creep produces standards the supply chain actually adopts, or governance documents that stay on the shelf, is the live question for the next 18 months of his tenure.