In a bid to improve levels of transparency and accountability throughout the programmatic space, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Tech Lab on Tuesday unveiled a major overhaul to
its content taxonomy. IAB Tech Lab GM Alanna Gombert introduced the changes in a blog post entitled “Why a New Content
Taxonomy?”
Gombert wrote: “This taxonomy broadens the breadth of available online content, presents a clear and consistent framework to advertisers, and supports future updates as
content offerings change or develop over time.” She said that new additions to the taxonomy include content categorizations for events and attractions, wellness and medical health, the Internet
of Things, artificial intelligence, and smart consumer electronics.
“These updates will benefit companies in the programmatic space whether they want to effectively target and/or block
certain content categories, produce better data quality, or be able to more accurately and consistently describe their content,” Gombert wrote.
Gombert said the improvements in the
Content Taxonomy Version 2.0 include:
--The development of a machine-readable taxonomy with incorporated ID mappings.
--More than 400 new site content classifications across 29 Tier 1
categories in addition to updated categories.
--The creation ofindependent vectors for describing the topical attributes of the page itself and adding extra dimensions of data about a
given site’s content.
--Support for global applicability, or nomenclature expanded to reflect a global perspective, making it more inclusive of all areas of the world.
Gombert
said the latest version of the IAB Tech Lab’s Content Taxonomy is available for public review until March 1.