Business & finance
IAB Tech Lab
IAB Tech Lab is the non-profit standards body for digital advertising technology, founded in 2014, which develops specifications such as OpenRTB, VAST, ads.txt, sellers.json and the Open Measurement SDK.
IAB Tech Lab writes the technical rulebooks that let ad tech companies interoperate. It was established in 2014 as a separate organisation affiliated with the IAB, and its members include publishers, platforms, agencies, brands and ad tech vendors worldwide.
Its best-known standards include OpenRTB for programmatic auctions, VAST, VMAP and SIMID for video ads, ads.txt, app-ads.txt, sellers.json, the supplyChain object, buyers.json and ads.cert for supply-chain transparency, the Open Measurement SDK for app measurement, content and audience taxonomies, the IAB Global Privacy Platform privacy signal, and podcast measurement guidelines. It also maintains, with ABCe, the IAB/ABC Spiders & Bots List used for filtering GIVT. It runs compliance programs certifying companies against some standards.
Working groups draft specs, which go through public comment before release. Adoption is voluntary, so a standard only matters if the market implements it; some, such as ads.txt, spread quickly, while others, like OpenRTB 3.0, did not.
Think of it like this
IAB Tech Lab is like the committee that decides plug and socket standards: nobody is forced to follow them, but everything works better when they do.
An example
An SSP implements OpenRTB 2.6, publishes a sellers.json file, supports schain and passes GPP strings, all standards maintained by IAB Tech Lab.
Related terms
IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau)
The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) is the US-based trade association for the digital advertising and media industry, founded in 1996, which publishes research, guidelines and policy positions.
OpenRTB
OpenRTB is the open technical standard, maintained by IAB Tech Lab, that defines how bid requests and bid responses are formatted and exchanged in real-time bidding.
ads.txt
ads.txt (Authorized Digital Sellers) is a public text file on a website's domain listing which ad sellers and accounts are authorised to sell that website's ad inventory.
sellers.json
sellers.json is a public file in which SSPs and exchanges list their seller accounts, naming who owns each one and whether it is a publisher or an intermediary.
VAST
VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) is the IAB Tech Lab standard XML format that tells a video player which ad to play, where to fetch it and which tracking events to report.
Sources: IAB Tech Lab