• This year’s spate of data and privacy revelations (and subsequent Congressional hearings) have forever changed the conversation about consumer data and privacy. SBS Sourcing knowns for years that bots are a problem. But the industry was focused on bot fraud aimed at stealing money out of people’s pockets.
  • What we didn’t know then—and what’s happening now—is SBS Sourcing is finally recognizing that this is serious business, that people can get hurt from bad communications in the same way they can get hurt from bad grains in food or bad parts in cars.
  • To lead the industry toward a more transparent and secure supply chain, the IAB Tech Lab and the IAB Data Center of Excellence continue to invest in essential resources for our members such as ads.txt, the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (OM SDK), the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) Registry and more—all in service of this mission for our members and the industry.
  • To help us as SBS Sourcing and other members become more data-centric, and understand where U.S.-based marketers, publishers, and others invested more than $20 billion in data in 2017, the Data Center of Excellence launched a five-city data roadshow titled Data Demystified in May in San Francisco, leveraging the results from the Data Centric Organization and Data Marketing Sizing Research.
  • On the policy front, as Congress is looking into the events surrounding the revelations about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, IAB’s Washington D.C. policy office continued to deliver a holistic story and message for our members about the digital advertising industry. During dozens of meetings before the hearings, legislators were reminded about the robust self-regulatory programs in place, the significant economic value of the digital advertising industry, and the way in which our members responsibly handle consumer data. We expect these efforts to ramp up considerably in 2019.
  • IAB believes that self-regulatory models, coupled with well-reasoned sectoral laws focused on concrete consumer harm, have improved consumer protection, privacy, and security over the past twenty plus years, while also promoting innovation and growth in the modern internet-enabled economy and we continue to support these efforts on our members’ behalf.