HOLLYWOOD, Florida – Having recently released its first software development kit for monitoring in-app ads, the IAB Tech Lab is busily prepping the latest overhaul of open real-time bidding protocols. “I’m really excited about it,” says the IAB’s Alanna Gombert.
The Lab’s first SDK is a takeover of an initiative originally conceived and developed by Integral Ad Science. Called the Mobile Verification Open-Source Software Development Kit, it will help app publishers set up monitoring of in-app ads without relying on multiple SDKs from multiple ad platforms or other partners, as Marketing Land reports.
“It’s our very first tool that we’re putting onto our repository that IAS and other members of the community have given to us to open source,” Gombert explains during an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “We should have tools for everyone to use in our ecosystem…to help get them to the same level on the framework side of our business.”
The open RTB protocol upgrade is aimed at being more transparent and engineering-focused, according to Gombert. “We had a summit in Boston two days ago and we talked about a brave new world for advertising and a way to think about open RTB as a framework for the next generation of ads and exchanges,” she adds.
The new version will address user happiness and transparency, supply chain economics and supply chain transparency, says Gombert, who is both SVP of Technology & Ad Ops for the IAB and GM of the IAB Tech Lab.
Declaring that the problem in digital right now is that “the focus on user experience is just not there,” she says the fledgling Coalition for Better Ads wants to create a methodology “to improve user experience and hopefully prevent ad blocking in our world.”
The Coalition’s near term output hopefully will yield “a global realization of the user experience problem in our industry and adoption of the standards,” says Gombert.
Asked to comment on server-to-server technology and its impact on user experience, she explains that while it’s a topic of much conversation of late, there are ways to optimize in-browser technology. As for header bidding, the technique that enables publisher to surface the best offers for their ad inventory, Gombert says the Tech Lab is considering a standard for it even as there are different points of view on the subject.
“Google has its own solution, which is not header bidding, which is equally as important,” says Gombert. “I think we need to think about everyone’s technology stack and talk about what would work for the publishers and consumers.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
