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Ep. 117 From Hype to Reality: AI, Advertising, and What’s Next with David Cohen (IAB CEO)
00:24:11
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTech God. Welcome to today's episode of the AdTech God Pod. With me today is David Cohen, the CEO of IAB. I'm really excited to be partnering with the IAB for IAB ALM taking place in Palm Springs on February 1st. February 3rd. David, I am excited to have you here. Thanks for joining me today.
- [00:31]
B
It is my pleasure. Atg. I think this is the second one of these that we've done and I'm looking forward to it.
- [00:37]
A
Yeah, same here. I think last time we did a wrap up episode after your last IAB ALM event, it was great. Listenership was fantastic and I took away so much knowledge and insight into what was happening in the industry. So I'm really excited to have you back with me today. So thanks for joining.
- [00:53]
B
You bet.
- [00:53]
A
So a lot's changed in 12 months, David. AI was a very soft topic 12 months ago, meaning we didn't know how it was going to impact our industry. We weren't sure how it was going to be applied. But there was a lot of talk and buzz about it and over the last 12 months it's really taken off. I would love to hear from your perspective what feels really different about the industry now in comparison to where we were last year at alm.
- [01:19]
B
Yep. So I think going to ALM last year we were all still very engaged and involved in the death of the cookie. Cookie deprecation was still a very, very hot topic. Privacy sandbox was in development and we and obviously IAB Tech Lab were providing lots of inputs into kind of the solution that is being offered up. What does the industry need? What are we hearing? And obviously that's not a conversation anymore. So that's a radical departure. I think that you're right. AI has gone, you know, from a dead start three years ago, let's say, to basically taking over every conversation that we have. So from kind of promise to practice, I think we have lots of good use cases in a variety of parts of the, of the industry that are, you know, just giving us a glimpse of what AI is going to do for us. I still think that we're scratching the surface on AI. I think there's so much more for us to do, but at least we have some now. Good. Kind of like, oh yes, that's awesome. Oh we want to do that a little different. I think the whole kind of creativity area is one that I've been personally really excited to see a lot of embracing of the use of AI. I think hyper personalization at scale is something that we've talked about for eons and not really delivered on as an industry. So I'm excited to see that move forward. I think as folks move into ALM this year, we have more choice, more options, more automation and probably a less well defined signal. So data and identity I think is still an area for us to work on.
- [03:06]
A
Yeah, I mean, taking it back to the AI piece.
- [03:10]
B
Yeah.
- [03:10]
A
I felt last year there was a huge focus around generative AI and what AI meant in that aspect in terms of the creative. But the creative 12 months ago doesn't even compare to what's being created today in the market. The advancements we've seen in 12 months has been incredible. But now we're hearing about operational efficiencies, we're hearing about creative, we're hearing about utilization for data and what that means for creating and customizing segments on a fly, how that decisioning is done and improving the way we target our advertisers or our consumers in the market. It's quite incredible. Do you think that there's any aspect of AI in the market as it applies to data that's hot for you, something that you feel is really interesting that's happening?
- [03:53]
B
So, I mean, if you look at the overall kind of marketing equation, from insights to measurement and optimization, insights generation assisted by AI has really gone to town. I mean, I think that there's lots of folks who are using kind of automated systems to do a lot of kind of the, the data collection, the information gathering that we were doing kind of manually for a long time. So that's particularly exciting. I think that some of the things that we try to bring back down to basics, not to be a wet blanket, is kind of. If you don't have a stable and solid data foundation, it's really hard to build a lot of these systems on top of it. And we still have folks that have dirty data, for lack of a better term, not structured in the way that it needs to be structured. So I'm not sure if there's anything that has blown me away in that regard, but that is an absolute need of the industry.
- [04:54]
A
What worries you the most? AI has impacted companies both positively and negatively. But what worries you the most in regards to how AI is being adopted in advertising overall? Is there anything that you feel is not a positive?
- [05:09]
B
Well, there's obviously a couple of things. I mean, we have a very substantial publisher community at IB IB for the first 15 or 16 years of its existence was publisher only. And I think publishers have been on both sides of that equation. Opportunities certainly, but challenge for sure. Some of the, you know, the basic mechanics of how we built the commercial Internet over the past three decades have been called into question. You know, search, drive to web, monetize, optimize, yield, all that stuff is kind of falling apart right before our eyes. So that's challenging. I think that we also have a, this, this land grab gold rush phenomenon that is happening before we have real good industry alignment on what are we trying to solve. So I've had at ces, I moderated a few panels and we dove into that. And I will tell you that there is not really clear specificity around what are we trying to solve with our agentic solutions. I think the general gist of efficiency and workflow management, I think that's obvious, but double click on that a little bit and what does that look like? And I think that that's a little unclear. So the land grab gold rush, I've been in this business for a long time, probably unlike anything I could remember seeing in the recent past. So that, that concerns me. I think it's fair to say that code moves faster than standards and we need lots and lots of good tests and experiments to figure out what exactly works, doesn't work, and how do we kind of align on standards. So that's another thing that, that worries me, that the rush to judgment, the rush to skip over some of the hard work concerns me.
- [07:00]
A
You know, David, you touch upon a lot there. The standardization is so important and there are still solutions in market and issues in market that need to be addressed before we jump and leap into other agentic solutions and frameworks. There's still a lot of work to do around measurement. There's still a lot of work to do around frequency. There's still a lot of work to do in terms of improving consumer behavior and viewing habits. And yet we're jumping immediately into the whole next new shiny object. And I love the fact that IAB Tech Lab just launched their own standard for agentic. I think the market needed it and I think there's no better group than to do that at the IAB Tech Lab. So I'm glad that there is an initiative there. The market needs that, the industry needs that.
- [07:47]
B
Appreciate that. Thank you.
- [07:48]
A
When you take a look and you, you, you have great relationships and you have publishers, advertisers, agencies, brands, they come to you as the IAB and they have conversations with you, what have you heard from Them is the biggest challenge we know publishers or the change in consumer behavior going to LLMs, set a search. But what are you hearing from agencies and brands today?
- [08:11]
B
Well, it's an interesting one because you know, when, when AI becomes the interface for discovery and the interface for commerce, there's lots of folks that have challenges around that. So if you are a brand and you have a brand website, if you're an auto manufacturer or if you're in the kind of travel industry or financial services industry, you have very similar challenges to as if you were a publisher, because you are a publisher. So I think understanding what happens in those AI systems for discoverability, for kind of like all the things that we have kind of grown up with in the industry, I think that's a, that's a real challenge. That's number one. Number two, I would say we hear all the time that the market is moving faster than the infrastructure. And that infrastructure, I mean we, we have publisher systems, brands and marketers who are built on kind of legacy systems that are, you know, hard to rebuild and update. And so we're moving at lightning speed but we still have some of the kind of fundamentals that are stuck in the past. So I think, I think those are the two that come immediately to mind. And then obviously the monetization challenge around publishers is one that I mentioned before.
- [09:32]
A
When you talk to brands in particular, what kind of feedback are you getting from them in terms of what's hot to them? Like what are they really excited about going into 2026? Where should they be focusing and where should they be quite frankly ignoring?
- [09:47]
B
Yep. So we have an outlook survey study that's coming out in I think about a week's time we go out to the market. I think this time we pull 200 brands and agencies on exactly that question. Where are you looking to invest? Where are you looking to pull back? What are you excited about? What are some of your challenges? So I can't really, I'm not ready to reveal the full details of that. But the good news is overall 2026 looks like it's going to be another positive year. So a year of growth, which is a good thing. High single digit growth, the areas that are particularly hot, not going to shock you. CTB Commerce creator and I think that there's a bunch of other stuff but those are the three big, those are the three big winners. I think streaming audio and video are both growing at a nice clip. Commerce has been growing quite nicely. And creator, you know we have some brands like Unilever who are really, really embracing the creator economy in a meaningful way and we're seeing others kind of follow suit. So those would be the three areas that I would say are the. Are the quote unquote hot?
- [10:59]
A
You know, David, I hate to refer to myself as a creator, but I'm, I'm very bullish on the creator economy. And I just say that I think the, the creation of content, the amount of talent in the market that was relatively unknown prior to social media and the acceptance that anyone can create content and that content can be of value and can be valuable to advertisers overall is just so incredible and amazing. It's created market and it's created so many other great companies in the market. I want to fast forward IEB alm, I was there last year, absolutely incredible event. You guys do a fantastic job bringing great speakers, great people. I mean the caliber of people that attend IEB ALM is by far top notch. Like there's no other way around it. I would love to hear from you what you're hoping happens at ALM this year and what you will be covering overall.
- [11:51]
B
Yeah. So thank you for that and I'll, I'll give you something under the table later for the, for the good words. I think it, you know, a T shirt.
- [12:02]
A
I'll take a T shirt. David.
- [12:03]
B
We made actually backpacks recently for the team, so maybe we'll give you an ib. An IB Tech club backpack.
- [12:08]
A
I love it.
- [12:09]
B
So question now, number one is how do we in the kind of excitement and exuberance around AI and we are equally excited about AI, how do we operationalize that responsibly? I think that's kind of like that's job number one. So how do we think about that? How do we build for purpose? How do we establish first principles? How do we build to what the industry is looking for? I think that's clear. I think number two is how do we support the publisher community, you know, in, in lots of different ways. We'll, we'll talk about that on stages, in hallways. My speech that I give on Monday morning, which is just about done, we'll talk to that as well. So I think that's another area that we'll focus on. You know, we have tracks and we have breakout sessions and it's all the areas that we've talked about. It's AI, it's measurement, it's privacy, it's commerce, it's creator and it's streaming audio and video. And all of those areas are obviously super important to the ecosystem in varying Degrees.
- [13:13]
A
How does this event in particular really influence what's happening in 2026? Is this more of, hey, this is from our purview, what we feel is really important. We want to address it and talk about it. You should go and address this as well. Is this collected over a period of time in terms of research that you've done? In order to decide on the agenda? I would love to hear a little bit more about that and how you pick these topics and how you hope to utilize the information shared and received for the future.
- [13:43]
B
Sure. Great question. We're in the market every day. We get feedback all the time. Some of it is unsolicited. We like that just fine. They say feedback is a gift. We agree. So we have no question around what the industry is interested in talking about. We do a couple of dipsticks throughout the year. We do a member survey. We get a thousand members to kind of tell us what's important to you versus year ago. What are we doing well as I.B. what could we be doing better? So we have really good kind of mechanics in place to figure out where we should spend our time. But I think that, you know, we have debates internally all the time. You know, there are some that think that we should have a five year roadmap. And I, I don't subscribe to believing that we could predict five years out. You know, if I look at the plan that we present to our board in November, which we did last November and got approval on, we plan for the 8020 rule, we plan for 80% of our bandwidth and resources and leave 20% open for things that might come up during the year. But by the same token, if I look at the plan that we present and what actually happens in the following year, in some cases it changes markedly. I don't think In November of 2024 we were talking about Agentic AI. I know we weren't to the degree that we are now. And now we have a whole set of agentic initiatives both on the tech lab and the IB side of the equation that we just wouldn't have predicted at that time. So keeping in mind the 8020 rule, we use ALM as a validator for are we heading in the right direction, do we need to pivot or the things that we're not focused on. And we listen as much as we talk. So we'll be on stages giving our point of view on these topics. But a lot of this is designed to hear from the industry on what is valuable to them.
- [15:40]
A
If there was one thing in the industry that you feel you could totally reset in terms of an industry norm. What would that be for you?
- [15:47]
B
David well, this one is I've talked about, I don't know if I talked about Lee before. This is the fictitious belief that cheaper is better and that efficiency is kind of the business goal is something that when I was on the agency side of the business, it's been around for a long time, but it has been a gradual erosion of value creation. And when everyone is interested in saving money buying cheap, buying cheaper than I bought last year, it benefits nobody. So I wish that we would move or change the value equation from efficiency to effectiveness. I think that's number one. And then number two, which is a little bit embarrassing to say, I still see clicks and click through rates and that as a measure of success for kind of marketers. And there have been tons of studies that have shown that there is absolutely no correlation between click through rate and clicks and actual business outcomes. So that would be my number two, a fast follow to the fictitious belief that cheaper is dead.
- [17:04]
A
So here's one thing that I think has been really interesting looking into IB Almighty, the absolute caliber of speakers that you have. I'm going to read some off to you because I'm sure you're aware of this. But even just looking at it prior to this call, number one, you have Kevin Bacon, which I'm a fan of. I think it'll be cool. Definitely going to try to get a selfie with him, assuming I'm attending. You got people from out front. Ali Sheen, Cole McBoy, Snowflake, Chief, Index, Spark. Like the lineup you have is absolutely incredible. How do you decide on who speaks and who speaks about what? It just seems like between covering CTV and Commerce and Creator measurement. How do you decide to bring these speakers to come speak at your event and what makes them so interesting to the people that are attending?
- [17:51]
B
Yep. Well, you're in the events business too, so I can ask you the same question. But we spent probably about six months on programming alm and you know, the main stage of alm, you know, not not to kind of compare with other events, we really view that largely as sacrosanct. You can't pay your way onto the main stage at alm. And there's a couple of exceptions to that because, you know, at the end of the day there is a commercial component to events, the business of events, which we need to be mindful of. So we have absolute liberty to put the people that we think are the best representatives of whatever that topic is. And it's not about a pay to play kind of scenario. On some of our tracks, obviously we have sponsors and we include sponsors. But our barometer for whether we choose sponsors or don't choose sponsors is do they naturally make sense? Are they industry leaders in whatever that topic area is? Because you don't want someone to be sitting in that kind of room, thinking, scratching their head. Well, this doesn't, this is not relevant to me. This makes no sense. Why do we choose them? So it has to be obvious. You ralled off a couple of companies. These are industry leading companies with industry leaders who no one will bat an eyelash, will believe that they are kind of the creme de la creme of the industry. And we have internal battles back and forth. I will tell you it doesn't always go as planned. Last minute changes, trying to program some things which we think are relatively easy, are never easy. So it's a give and take. But we have a team, events team and a programming team that's second to none. And I feel really, I mean, I looked at that list too and obviously I'm jaded and perhaps not as objective, but when you look at the totality of those speakers on any year, last year, this year, it's pretty impressive and I am very, very proud of that.
- [19:48]
A
It is impressive. As you mentioned, someone who's in the events business, I can tell you it is a lot of work. I do not handle that aspect and I don't know if I would want to. But the team we have working on it works around the clock, making sure we have the right content, the right people, the right topics. And it has to be relevant and fresh. And that combination is just such a skill. And truly the team is just incredible to be able to do it. So last time we spoke, you said you were moving out of Palm Springs and you're moving to Texas. Is that still part of the plan next year?
- [20:23]
B
Yeah. So we are still planning that San Antonio will be 2027, 2028. We're excited about that. It's not a typical stop on the conference train. So we think that that would be a nice change of pace for some conference goers. I would not be doing a service to my organization if I didn't mention one thing that we're doing at ALM this year, which is we're celebrating our 30th anniversary and IB was founded in 1996 and we have a bunch of programming that's going to support that. I think at the end of Sunday we're going to have 12 past chairs of IB join us on stage to talk about kind of like from the foundation, what were some of the challenges, trials and tribulations to kind of the future. So I'm super excited about that. I think that's super awesome. And you know, 30 years is nothing to sneeze at. And of course along the way it hasn't all been, you know, peaches and cream. But I think on the whole we. One of the things I did in preparation for ALM is just look at the growth of the industry over the past three years. And there were only four years in those 30 that we did not experience double digit growth as an industry. Three were negative and you can imagine it was 2001, 2002, 2009, and one year was single digit growth, which was 2023. But other than that, every year has been double digit growth. And I think there are many industries that would look at that and say, wow, that's pretty amazing. So we've got lots to be thankful for.
- [22:03]
A
I agree. I think the optimism and the positive growth of the advertising industry overall has been really incredible. I think that's why I in particular really focus on the positive. I think every industry you work in is pretty negative, but this industry is growing fast compared to any other industry. We are definitely sitting in that top 10, 15% of industries that are growing and at this pace. And I think we should all be really thankful for being in such a fun, human, connected industry that is just enjoyable and always changing and challenging at the same time.
- [22:39]
B
Totally great. One of the things, not to give away my speech about 30 minutes of oration that I'm planning for, but one of the things that I talk about is I think our job certainly at IB and personally is to leave the industry better than we found it. That's one of the reasons why I took this job and I remind myself of that often. And I think that we all have a responsibility to do that. We can all get wrapped up in our own kind of individual desires and personal growth needs. But if we really look at the industry as a whole, let's leave it better than we found it. I think we've done in general a good job of that. So that that's something to be really proud of.
- [23:21]
A
David, thank you so much for being here and we are beyond excited to be media partners with you. We are looking forward to meeting with you at the event and good luck. I'm sure you will do a fantastic job. So thank you for having us.
- [23:34]
B
Thank you very much.
- [23:36]
A
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the the people stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of adtech. Don't miss out on the latest updates, so follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.