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Foreign.
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Welcome to today's episode of the refresh by AdTech God, where we bring you the latest and greatest in advertising news. Don't forget to follow the Marketecture account on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube for more news. Related content before we start, I wanted to cover some market announcements. On March 17, 2025, Marketexture Live presents thriving in Chaos, a high energy, no nonsense conference in New York City designed for marketers, publishers, agencies and of course, ad tech companies that are near and dear to my heart. We are ready to take on an unpredictable future in advertising. The industry shifting. Cookies are disappearing, AI is rewriting the playbook, regulations are evolving, and of course consumer habits are harder than ever to pin down. So join us for insightful keynotes and hands on workshops that go beyond the buzzwords and deliver real strategies you can apply immediately. You can go to marketlive.com or@tech God.com and click on the Market tab at the top. Okay, now to our podcast. I Had to do that David okay, today we have David Cohen, the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, otherwise known as iab. For those who do not know what the IAB is, it is an industry group that sets the standards, policies and best practices for the digital advertising industry. David's fresh off an incredible 2025 IAB ALM event which took place in Palm Desert, which I had the honor of attending. Some of the biggest players, tackled some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in 2025. David, I'm excited to have you here with me today and thank you for joining me.
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A
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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B
David. After, what was it, two and a half days, three days of being in Palm Desert, there was so much content and such good content. I was telling Kate, before you jumped on the quality of the guests, the discussions that came up were incredible. Probably one of the best events I've been to where I just didn't leave my seat a majority of the time. But AI seemed to be a very hot topic and there was a lot of spotlight on it. Overall, what do you think was the most compelling takeaways on how, you know, AI is reshaping media buying, measurement and consumer engagement that you could take away from this event?
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I'm glad you were there. I'm glad you got to experience it. I'm just about getting my voice back, so I look forward to diving in and talking about it. AI is one of those things that we marvel at. I marvel at that. You know, 24 months ago it wasn't part of the conversation at all it was just a foundational or ingredient in kind of lots of what we did. Predictive AI has been around, as I'm sure you know, for 15 or so years. But we look at it in two ways and I think you probably got a taste of both during alm. There's the threat. Vector AI is definitely upending some of the things that we've come to know and love in the digital ecosystem. You know, the, the role of search and search results and the lack of potential traffic getting driven to publishers and monetization opportunities. So that's challenging. There's the ingestion of, you know, publisher created content into large language models which needs to get commercial agreement figured out as to what that looks like. So that would be under the threat side. You know, we like spending a lot more time appropriately on the opportunity and we don't think that there is a part of the value chain that goes untouched by AI. So everything from insights to planning to execution to measurement and optimization, everything will have an AI component to it. I mean, one of the things that I have been saying for years and I think that it's really coming to the fore is that we have spent a relatively little amount of time talking about the creative and creativity side of the business. We have tremendously over indexed on technology and data and media. But I think that generative AI brings the opportunity for creative to such a spotlight that will spend more time thinking about dynamic ad copy and visual asset creation, et cetera, et cetera, product descriptions for E commerce. The last thing I'll say on AI, which I think is another area that I'm particularly interested in. I've been in the business 30 years and we've been using market mixed models as a means of allocating our marketing spend and those are genuinely backward looking, a little slow to react. The market is changing so quickly. Market mix modeling that can happen in near real time is something that I think AI brings to the fore, which we're particularly excited about.
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B
You know, you touched up on, on the creative piece and that we've been so focused on technology for many, many years, since the inception of advertising and ad tech. The creative piece to me was really interesting. The, the meta discussion that came up and the quality of the generative creative that was being made, the videos that were being made were incredible. And knowing that that is something that will be a part of the advertising ecosystem, that those creatives will be made, those videos will be made, takes us outside of our comfort zone in a way and really gives us an opportunity to create More solutions for our clients.
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Absolutely. I mean I've long said that, you know, the ability to understand consumers habits, preferences, wants and dislikes, personalization means nothing when you have three pieces of creative. You know, when you have the ability to customize and personalize in such a incredible way, thousands of different iterations, it really makes it meaningful. And I think that, you know, whether you take individual product images, turn that into full sight, sound in motion, the multimodal component which I think you're touching on, that Meta talked about, or Amazon has done, or Google has done and others, is really exciting, really fantastic.
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That's the piece of AI that I love. The optimization is, is incredible. The insights that you could utilize with your own data or other third party data sources is also really interesting. LLM is something that obviously is now being integrated on a bunch of the front end UIs easily to plan and develop campaigns and serve those campaigns based off of inputs. But the creative piece I'm truly fascinated by. The other topic that came up was addressability. Cookie deprecation is basically in full swing. We have a lot of new identity solutions that are coming up. What is the IAB stance on the most viable path forward?
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A
So a year ago there was nothing but cookie deprecation in the kind of ether. It was part of every conversation that we were having. And I don't know if you noticed, but it really hasn't been a focus in Alma this year. I mean if I were to summarize, it's a complicated question, but if I were to kind of take it at 60,000ft, the future will not be one thing. The future will be you need to diversify, you need to test, you need to explore. It is not cookie out something else in. I think that there is a recognition that things like contextual advertising will get a new breath of life. I think that there is ID less solutions being explored and being kind of developed. There's the pair protocol that Google donated to the Tech Lab which allows kind of the matching of first party data in a privacy compliant way. There's lots of clean rooms, privacy sandbox, a lot of privacy enhancing technologies. This is a portfolio of solutions. So our takeaway or our guidance is if you have logged in users, if you have first party data, there's a whole set of things that you could be exploring if you're not so fortunate to have that. If you still rely on third party relationships, there's a whole host of other opportunities and both of those will coexist. So the short answer is not one solution important to Diversify, test and explore. I think the industry has taken a long time. We've been talking about the death of the cookie for years and years and years and we already are seeing have seen something like 50% less signal. Given the current state of affairs, I think cookie deprecation will be a non event if and when it actually does happen. We've had such a long time to prepare for this inevitability that whether it's a consumer choosing to opt out of the third party cookie regime or it going away because of ATT or other, or Safari or Firefox, this is a new day. And if you're not exploring new opportunities, you're going to be left behind.
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That brings me to my next question. There's a lot of regulatory pressure that continues to mount. The discussion around privacy and data usage. AI governance is intensifying. Where do you find the biggest policy challenges we're facing right now in our industry?
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It's fascinating the whole area, we spent a lot of time on it and it is definitely changing, it is definitely evolving. So I'll give you a couple of kind of top line takeaways. I mean obviously we have, unlike in Europe, we have a patchwork of 20 states that have their own individual privacy laws and that that provides the industry with a significant challenge and opportunity to meet the threshold of those laws. So we have put tools out into the marketplace to help the industry and in acknowledging and adhering to those state laws. So everything from the mspa, which is the multi state Privacy Agreement, it is a what they call a springing contract because there are sales that go up and down the supply chain, allows folks that won't necessarily have contracts with one another be bound by contractual privity to comply with those state laws. And we have about 1300 signatories to the MSPA. So that's if you're not familiar with that, important for you to become familiar. Obviously we have with the Ivy Tech Lab, we have the GPP global privacy platform which is a protocol that, you know, streamlines the transmission of privacy consent and consumer choice. So it works with tcf, it works with the MSPA national string, also individual state strings. So that's another kind of tool in our toolbox. And then we have just recently introduced something called the IAB diligence platform because most state laws include third party risk management requirements. And instead of kind of going and asking, you know, a separate questionnaire every time, it's important to have kind of one standard way of doing that and do it once and kind of let it go across your supply chain. So those are three important things that we have put in the marketplace to help the market adhere to the 20 state laws that currently exist. We do believe that there will be more states that come online this year. It will not be outlandish to add five additional states. It could be even more than that. But I think that the new administration brings a whole new set of challenges. I think that the, the FTC over the past four years, which has been on a pretty much a tear against the industry. They've coined this phrase surveillance capitalism and surveillance advertising, and basically with one fell swoop painted the industry with a brushstroke that everyone's doing something bad and surreptitious, which is obviously not the case. I think that the new FTC will be kinder and gentler to industry, and I think that the focus will be less on what has historically been the mantra and more on some of the new, new things that are coming up, whether it's kids and teens or AI or sensitive personal information like health. It is obvious also that the new administration will be much more focused on issues of content moderation, issues surrounding Section 230, you know, the law that gives platforms immunity from what's posted on their platforms. I think that those are the things that we will see much more time and attention against than we have seen certainly the last four years. I think AI legislation, while it certainly is going to be in consideration, I think the general gist that we're getting is that there'll be the opportunity for more innovation and slightly less legislation, which I think is probably welcome for industry. The last thing I'll say is we have been pushing for a national, comprehensive and preemptive data privacy law in the U.S. for at least seven or eight years. And it has been challenging to get that done. If ever there was a time to put that over the finish line, it would be when you have a single party majority in the Senate, in the House and in the executive branch. So we are cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to potentially advance a national data privacy law in the US over the next two years. That will be the litmus test and we're pushing very, very hard to make that a reality.
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David, what would that mean for the industry overall? So rather than having individual states have their own regulation and laws about privacy, but moving to, would that be considered more federal level were countrywide, everybody needs to abide, would that almost eliminate the state by state laws or would they be in tandem?
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That's, that's exactly that's. The crux of the issue. It makes no sense to have a federal law if it doesn't override the existing state laws. So when we say preemptive, it would be one law for the land that would override all of the individual state laws. So we would have one set of policies that as an industry, we need to adhere to. So the complexity of the current system is obviously apparent. And it would be a simpler architecture for us to all follow a single law for the land.
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It's also safer for the consumer and the tech companies. Being able to abide by one law across the land is just easier to comply with, easier to not make mistakes. It just becomes a standard practice for everyone. So with all of these leaders, industry leaders, gathering at alm, what was the most surprising conversation that came up this year?
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Well, I'll answer it backwards if you don't mind. The things that were not surprising were measurement, front and center. Number one issue. Always privacy, commerce, streaming, creators. All of that was kind of front and center. I would say the lack of a cookie discussion was potentially surprising. You know, the. The other thing that I wouldn't say is surprising, but it's a little disappointing. So I won't exactly answer the question as asked, but we call responsible media as kind of a catch. All that includes a whole bunch of stuff, whether it's sustainability or DEI or brand safety or supporting quality journalism. That whole area, it has not been a home run or slam dunk for some time, but in the current environment, it is even more pressured. Brand safety with the dissolution of Garm has been a challenge for the industry. Sustainability and DEI has been something that both marketers and media companies are kind of taking a step back and reassessing. That's just one. That is just an acknowledgement that we need to kind of continue to keep that front and center. The other thing I'd say as a trade association CEO, we generally don't love talking about any individual members, but it's hard not to. TikTok. When we were at CES, there was a lot of conversation around TikTok and I think that now it's really just in a wait and see mode. So I was surprised that there wasn't more conversation around that. I think that there's a general sense that it will get figured out, but we'll have to see.
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I mean, the timeline they have is relatively short. Under, I think it was under 90 days to figure out.
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It was 75 days.
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Yeah, 75 days. So I mean, that's, that's a pretty short time frame to decide the fate of, of a major platform like TikTok, but hopefully if the process moves quickly and the initiative is there that they'll extend and, you know, abide by what's being required. Last question for you is you had mentioned that you were moving this event. Historically it's been in Palm Desert. It's also been in Florida. Where's the next IAB ALM atg?
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This is going to be a. You heard it here first, I guess.
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Breaking news.
- [17:20]
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We're holding true to the podcast. We have moved ALM around. It has been at Palm Desert a lot. I am happy to say that we are back at palm desert in 2026 and then we are moving to San Antonio for 2027 and 2028, which is interesting. I've never been to San Antonio. I hear lots of really good things about it. It is, you know, one of, one of the things I've learned in this job is that no matter what you choose, you're not going to please everyone. You know, the east coast doesn't like, the west coast doesn't like it. There are quite a few direct flights from both coasts. It is more centrally located and the venue is awesome. So San Antonio for two years and we're already investigating 2029, so we'll see where we end up after San Antonio for two years.
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Texas has a pretty bustling advertising industry. It just doesn't get as much recognition, I think, as the coasts do. And then Austin is an incredibly close and thriving ad tech industry there. So I think Texas being centrally located is not a bad thing at all. I think it actually just simplifies everybody's travel plans.
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Yeah, the proximity to south by Southwest has made Austin probably not as appealing. But yeah, San Antonio is not one that is typically on the conference circuit. So we're always trying to find places that are new and unexplored and untapped. So we feel good about it and hopefully the industry will too.
- [18:55]
B
Incredible. David, thank you. Thank you again for being here today as my guest. I really appreciate all that you do for the industry and I appreciate inviting me to your IAB ALM event.
- [19:05]
A
My pleasure. Thanks very much.