IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau)

The IAB — Interactive Advertising Bureau — is digital advertising's trade association and de facto standards body, founded in New York in 1996. Through the IAB Tech Lab it maintains the specifications the ecosystem runs on: ad formats and sizes, VAST for video, OpenRTB for programmatic bidding, ads.txt against spoofed inventory, and measurement definitions including the viewability standard (with the MRC). Its annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report with PwC is the industry's official scoreboard.

Interoperability is invisible until it breaks: every banner that renders, every programmatic bid that clears, every video ad that plays across thousands of sites does so on IAB specs. For marketers the practical surfaces are the standards that protect spend (ads.txt, sellers.json), the definitions that settle measurement disputes (what counts as viewable), and the revenue report that benchmarks channel shifts with two decades of consistent history.

Buy against the standards — verify publishers' ads.txt, demand MRC/IAB-consistent viewability reporting, and use standard formats unless custom earns its premium. Cite the revenue report for channel-trend arguments (it's the longest consistent series), and watch Tech Lab roadmaps (privacy, CTV, attention measurement) as the early warning of what next year's buying looks like.

Founded in 1996 as the banner-ad era's trade group (early work: standardizing the 468×60), it grew with the medium — the Tech Lab spun up in 2014 to house the engineering, and inventions like ads.txt (2017) answered each era's fraud crisis with a spec.

Etymology: source.

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