• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 26, 2018

The advertising industry sits on the cusp of changes to the business of data. It was already an imperfect system and now it will get more complicated. The industry will need to figure out how to get around the roadblocks.

Greater transparency and more information about the data being used by advertisers could help open doors. The more information about the data, the more valuable.

Think audience ingredients reports like the kind found on the back of a cereal box, says David Justus, Lotame vice president and IAB Tech Lab Data Transparency Standards Working Group co-chair. He explains how the framework will work to improve on the challenges ahead for the advertising industry.

Justus provides a glimpse into the possibilities made available through the IAB Tech Lab’s framework for the labeling system announced about a month ago.

The framework, which identifies attributes all data providers share, will provide standards to label the market segments, including where the data was collected and sourced, how and when it was collected and made available, and if the data was modeled.

The labels are machine readable to support new targeting models, Justus said.

The labeling system will indicate the percentage of cookies or mobile IDs in audience segments that are collected before or after a certain date that come from a channel, whether mobile, app or web. It allows for easy calculation of summary statistics. And as the data passes through the supply chain, each company would add the required labels.