• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

IAB Tech Lab has created a new industry body designed to bring together media buyers, media owners, and ad-tech platforms to improve transparency and governance across digital advertising.

Initial participants in the Programmatic Governance Council announced Tuesday include representatives from agencies, publishers, and platforms including Dentsu, Omnicom Media Group, WPP, Disney, Magnite, PubMatic, Hearst, News Corp, Yahoo, Amazon Ads, The Trade Desk, Raptive and Mediavine, among others.

"Programmatic advertising moves billions of dollars every day, but too often the people responsible for it are not sitting together to deal with the real operational problems," stated Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. 

Katsur believes programmatic advertising has grown "incredibly fast, but the governance around how that market should operate hasn't kept pace with its scale, complexity, and automation."

The risk becomes inefficiency if governance is not put in place to support the more than $200 billion in digital advertising now traded programmatically in the United States, as automation increasingly shapes how media is bought and sold. The group believes it requires greater transparency and governance to succeed.

During the next six to 12 months, the group will work toward providing clear guidance on auction transparency, more consistent handling of transaction signals, and stronger alignment between buyers, sellers, and platforms.

The goal is to help buyers direct spend to supply-chain partners, providing clear value.

Programmatic advertising has been described as complex and opaque, according to IAB Tech Lab. The announcement further states that fragmented infrastructure, inconsistent practices, and limited shared governance have made it difficult for advertisers and publishers to operate with full confidence in the system.

"Recent market discussions around transaction IDs, bid duplication, and auction transparency have highlighted how differences in programmatic signal handling and auction mechanics can create confusion and friction across the ecosystem," according to IAB Tech Lab.

The council aims to address those concerns by giving senior industry leaders a structured forum to align business expectations connected to technical standards that underpin each digital advertising transaction.