From Video to Podcasts: How New IAB Standards Empower Advertisers
By Sam Griffith, Head of Digital at December19
As digital advertising spreads across screens and speakers, the IAB Tech Lab has rolled out new standards to make marketers’ lives easier. These initiatives – from updated video signals and a universal ad ID to a CTV-focused VAST addendum and podcast metrics – all aim to bring more clarity, consistency, and confidence for advertisers in a fragmented landscape. In this post, we’ll explore what each standard is and the strategic benefits they unlock for advertisers, in plain English.
Making Video Ads More Transparent with New Signals
Online video advertising used to suffer from vague placement definitions – was that “video ad” truly a pre-roll in premium content, or a tiny player buried on a webpage? To eliminate this guesswork, IAB Tech Lab updated the OpenRTB programmatic bidding protocol with new video signals that describe video inventory far more accurately.
This update significantly improved clarity in how video ad slots are defined, bought, and optimised. In practice, advertisers can now be confident about the context of the video impressions they buy – e.g. knowing for sure an ad slot is a true instream pre-roll versus some out-stream unit.
Better signals mean less ambiguity and no unpleasant surprises, which ultimately fosters a more transparent marketplace for everyone. The strategic win for advertisers? More trust that your video ad spend is hitting the quality placements you expect, leading to better performance and insight into what you’re paying for.
One ID to Rule Them All: Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF)
If you’ve ever seen the same ad bombard a viewer repeatedly or struggled to track a creative’s performance across different platforms, the Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) is here to help.
ACIF is essentially a universal “barcode” for ads. It assigns a unique creative identifier that travels with the ad through the whole supply chain so that every system recognises the creative as the same one.
This tackles the long-standing consistency and transparency challenges in a fragmented ecosystem. For advertisers, ACIF brings several big advantages:
Frequency management: With a universal ID, it’s easier to cap how often an individual ad is shown across various channels. No more accidental over-exposure because one platform didn’t know the ad already ran elsewhere.
Unified reporting: All impressions and performance data for a given creative can be aggregated, since they share one ID. ACIF ensures ads can be recognised, tracked, and validated consistently across platforms and devices – meaning an apples-to-apples view of your campaign.
Quicker troubleshooting: If a certain creative has an issue (say, audio problems or a formatting glitch), an advertiser or publisher can reference its universal ID when working with partners, making it far easier to pinpoint and fix. In short, ACIF creates a single source of truth, which streamlines creative management and tracking across platforms. That’s a strategic win for any advertiser looking to deliver a cohesive, well-managed campaign.
VAST CTV Addendum 2024: Bringing Advanced TV Features Everywhere
Connected TV is one of digital’s fastest-growing frontiers, but not everyone in the industry was on the latest tech standard to support it. Enter the VAST CTV Addendum 2024, which retrofits critical Connected TV capabilities into existing video ad specs.
VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) is the protocol for serving video ads, and many publishers still use older versions like VAST 2 or 3. The 2024 addendum provides backward-compatible extensions so even those older versions can support modern features needed for TV-style ads. For example, the addendum introduces support for ACIF tags, the Open Measurement SDK for viewability, interactive video elements, high-resolution creatives for big screens, and even new provisions to aid compliance with Europe’s Digital Services Act.
For advertisers, the benefit is a more consistent and enriched experience across all streaming platforms. A CTV campaign can include interactive or high-res creatives without worrying if a partner’s tech is too outdated to handle them. In fact, increasing adoption of the VAST CTV Addendum “stabilises the ability to manage campaigns cross-platform and increase overall ROI” (IAB). You get better measurement, ad decisioning, interactivity, legal compliance, and smoother creative delivery no matter which screen or app your ad runs on. Essentially, this addendum levels the playing field so that advanced TV advertising features work reliably everywhere – allowing your cross-screen video strategies to truly shine.
Podcast Measurement: Speaking a Common Language
Moving from screens to speakers, another IAB initiative is tackling the wild west of podcast metrics.
Podcasts offer incredibly engaged, niche audiences – in fact, podcast listeners are among “the most loyal and engaged audience of any digital medium” (IAB) – but measuring podcast ads isn’t as straightforward as measuring web or TV ads.
Downloads and listens are tracked via server logs, and different platforms historically had different ways of counting them. The IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines (now at version 2.2) set standard definitions for key metrics like what counts as a “download,” a listener, or an ad impression in a podcast. The goal is to ensure every publisher and ad platform measures these the same way, creating a level playing field.
For advertisers, this is a game-changer for trust and transparency.
With metrics consistently defined and measured equally across the podcast medium, you can finally compare performance from one podcast to another without fuzzy maths. Buying podcast ads becomes less of a leap of faith and more like buying on any other digital channel with metrics you can believe in.
The IAB Tech Lab even offers a compliance program for companies to certify that they adhere to the guidelines, so savvy advertisers can look for those certifications when choosing podcast partners. All of this means you can engage podcast audiences with confidence, armed with reliable data to back your investment.
Whether it’s clearer video ad signals, a universal creative ID, a future-proof CTV ad format, or trustworthy podcast metrics, the latest IAB standards are building a more transparent and cohesive advertising ecosystem.
Support for these standards is a core tenet of the IAB’s Gold Standard and is something we at December 19 strongly believe in. For advertisers, embracing these standards isn’t just a technical box-checking exercise – it’s a strategic move. You’ll be better equipped to manage frequency and messaging across platforms, gain more accurate insights, and ultimately drive higher ROI from emerging channels.
By working towards being Gold Standard certified, advertisers and agencies will help the industry adopt these innovations. Those who stay informed and insist on support for these standards will be poised to lead in the new era of cross-platform marketing.
