David Cohen

Cohen runs the trade body that sets the industry’s commercial calendar — the NewFronts each spring and the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting each winter — and that publishes the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, the dataset against which the rest of the digital ad market benchmarks itself. His public posture in 2026 has tilted aggressively toward two themes: creators as a parallel video economy that now rivals traditional TV in scale, and the need for standardization in retail media before the channel’s growth chokes on its own fragmentation.

That posture is consistent with his buy-side biography. Cohen spent two decades inside Interpublic Group — Universal McCann, then MAGNA — running media investment at a scale (more than $20 billion annually at MAGNA) that made him one of the few trade-body leaders whose career was built sitting across the table from the platforms his members now negotiate with. The IAB’s policy emphasis on supply-chain transparency, measurement standards, and post-cookie identity infrastructure traces, in part, to that vantage.