IAB Tech Lab

The dominant and de facto global standards body for digital advertising technology, with near-universal industry adoption of its core specifications

IAB Tech Lab is a nonprofit technology consortium and the technical standards arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Founded in 2014, it serves as the industry's central body for developing, testing, and maintaining technical standards, APIs, and data formats that enable interoperability across the digital advertising supply chain. Its work spans programmatic advertising, identity, privacy, measurement, and supply chain transparency. The organization is responsible for some of the most foundational specifications in AdTech, including OpenRTB (the protocol powering programmatic ad auctions), ads.txt/sellers.json (supply chain transparency tools), the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) for GDPR compliance, and the Global Privacy Platform (GPP). These standards are adopted by thousands of publishers, advertisers, agencies, DSPs, SSPs, and ad servers worldwide, making IAB Tech Lab an indispensable infrastructure layer for the industry. IAB Tech Lab occupies a unique and highly influential position in the AdTech ecosystem as a neutral, member-driven standards body. It does not compete commercially with its members but instead facilitates collaboration to solve industry-wide technical challenges. Its working groups bring together engineers and product leaders from major platforms including Google, Meta, The Trade Desk, Amazon, and hundreds of other companies to develop consensus-based solutions, particularly around privacy-preserving identity, addressability, and measurement in a post-third-party-cookie world.