• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, July 29, 2021

IAB Tech Lab has announced that it is launching an open-source initiative meant to enhance transparency and serve as a collaborative hub for the various open-source efforts already being led by ad-tech companies and other industry players.

“While there are several open-source projects supported by advertising technology companies and individuals, there has not been a concerted industry effort to organize and maintain relevant open-source projects in one place,” the group explained in its announcement. “The Open Source Initiative, housed on GitHub, seeks to solve this problem.”

"Having open access to all pertinent information in one central location can be immensely beneficial for the industry,” said Neal Richter, Tech Lab chairperson. “The Open Source Initiative provides an opportunity to enhance collaboration and increase more adoption of standards and software solutions to help support the advertising industry needs.”  

The group says it will provide actual standards implementations that can be directly integrated and tools to help deploy standards, and share samples or reference standards for implementation best practices.

Initial code contributions will come from engineering teams at Google, Index Exchange, The Trade Desk, and Zefr.

Initial focuses will include an open-source ID framework for Unified ID 2.0 (UID2); creating a repository of human-reviewed content, per GARM standards, for brand suitability test benchmarks; and creating proof-of-concept libraries for implementing authenticated connections for secure ad buying using in-progress Ads.cert 2.0 specification work.

The initiative will be governed by the IAB Tech Lab Architecture Group, which includes Extreme Reach, GroupM, GumGum, Oracle, Tapad and The Trade Desk.