The Interactive Advertising Bureau on July 9, 2026 released the Redefining Media Types Standard for public comment, proposing a shared vocabulary for classifying digital video across connected TV, online video, social video, free ad-supported streaming television, video podcasting and retail video. The public comment period runs through August 8, 2026, giving brands, agencies, publishers, ad tech vendors, networks and other stakeholders one month to submit feedback before IAB finalizes the framework, according to IAB.

Jamie Finstein, VP of Media Center at IAB, framed the release as a response to years of fragmentation across the video advertising ecosystem. "As the video marketplace has expanded across platforms, formats, and viewing experiences, the industry needs a more consistent way to define and classify digital video environments," Finstein said, according to the announcement. "The Redefining Media Types Standard is intended to give buyers, sellers, publishers, and platforms a shared, future-proof language that improves planning, execution, and measurement across the entire ecosystem."

What the standard actually classifies

Unlike prior classification efforts that grouped video by distribution technology or business model, the Redefining Media Types Standard, known internally as RMT, organizes video advertising environments according to how a viewer is physically and cognitively oriented toward a screen. IAB describes this first layer as organizing video advertising environments into four macro buckets grounded in consumer viewing experience, though the announcement names three: lean back viewing, personal screen viewing, and passive and communal viewing.

Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, positioned the technical body's role as connecting these consumer-facing definitions to underlying infrastructure. "Many of the technical systems supporting digital advertising still rely on inconsistent or outdated classifications for video," Katsur said, according to the announcement. "By partnering with IAB on this framework, we can help connect these technical definitions and infrastructure needed to support adoption across the industry."

That framing addresses what the standard describes as a structural mismatch. Legacy classification terms, the document states, were built to describe distribution technology and business models rather than the actual viewing experience a consumer has. For brands and agencies, that mismatch produces misaligned planning strategies and measurement that cannot be compared across platforms, since a campaign labeled one way inside a planning tool might carry different meaning inside a buying platform. For publishers, inconsistent terminology complicates how inventory gets packaged and how buyer expectations get set. For measurement providers, the absence of standardized classification limits the ability to build interoperable reporting systems.

Two layers, not one

The RMT Standard's architecture separates strategic planning from operational execution through two distinct layers. The first layer, the viewing buckets described above, operates as a strategic planning tool, giving media planners and buyers a shared vocabulary for how a marketing budget maps onto viewer behavior rather than onto a specific platform or ad format.

The second layer applies binary, impression-level attributes intended to classify individual ad impressions with precision across platforms and devices. According to the standard, these attributes include sound state, whether an impression is skip-enabled or completion-required, full-screen presentation, addressability, availability of signals, measurability, device type, and ad format. This operational layer is designed to give planners, buyers, measurement vendors, and ad tech platforms a common set of signals usable at the point of transaction, rather than after the fact during reconciliation.

The two layers are intended to work together. The viewing-bucket layer supplies the shared strategic language; the impression-attribute layer supplies the technical precision. According to IAB, the framework is built to be encoded directly into OpenRTB bid requests and into taxonomy fields tied to Project Eidos, IAB's broader measurement modernization initiative.

Why the timing matters

The RMT Standard does not arrive in isolation. It follows IAB's Campaign Data Standards 1.0, published on May 14, 2026 as the first output of Project Eidos, an initiative aimed at building a consistent, interoperable framework for structuring campaign data across placements, formats, and media types. Where Campaign Data Standards addressed the reconciliation problem between planning tools, buying platforms, and finance systems, the Redefining Media Types Standard addresses a narrower but related question: what a given video impression actually is, independent of which platform reports it.

The document notes that the framework is designed to feed into IAB Measurement Center's Project Eidos taxonomy work and to inform IAB Tech Lab's OpenRTB and AdCOM specifications, rather than function as a standalone reference document divorced from technical implementation.

That integration ambition sits inside a longer pattern of IAB Tech Lab standards work touching similar terrain. The organization finalized OpenRTB definitions for programmatic auctions covering the twelve-step workflow from inventory setup through transaction reconciliation, entering public comment on January 29, 2026. It also released CTV ad format standards for six formats including pause ads, menu ads, and screensaver ads on December 11, 2025, and updated content taxonomy for CTV genres as far back as December 11, 2024. Each of these efforts tackled a piece of the same underlying problem: video advertising infrastructure built by different companies at different times, using different vocabularies for functionally similar things.

The RMT Standard's stated goal of reducing ambiguity in video placement definitions also echoes earlier work. IAB Tech Lab clarified video placement definitions through the plcmt attribute in an update announced February 4, 2025, distinguishing instream, accompanying content, interstitial, and standalone placements. That clarification addressed implementation questions that had persisted since March 2023. The new RMT framework operates at a broader scope, addressing not just placement mechanics within a single video player but the classification of entire viewing environments across CTV, online video, social video, FAST, video podcasting, and retail video.

Industry reaction cited in the release

Several industry figures were quoted directly in IAB's announcement, offering perspective on why a shared classification system matters at this point in the video marketplace's development.

Adam Gerber, Head of Strategy at Media.net, connected the standard's timing to the pace of change across the marketplace. "Given the extent of change in the video marketplace, from what and where people watch to how advertisers execute ad campaigns, it was critical to come together as an industry and develop a new, contemporary video marketplace framework," Gerber said, according to the announcement. "The ambiguity and obsolescence of legacy definitions and ways of working were holding back growth and creating friction in the market."

Alex Stone, SVP and Managing Director at Horizon Media, described the standard in terms of operational guardrails. "With the constant innovation and increased complexity of our digital ecosystem, it is important for the industry to have consistent guiding principles in place," Stone said. "These IAB standards are our guardrails which we will use as our progression accelerates for years to come."

Michael Reidy, Senior Vice President for Small and Medium Business Growth in Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, tied the standard to premium video's competitive position. "As streaming and cross-platform video consumption continue to evolve, premium video remains one of the most effective environments for brands," Reidy said. "As an industry, we have an opportunity to align around clearer, more consistent standards that drive greater media effectiveness and deliver simplicity for our partners across buyers, sellers, and technology platforms."

Colt Cheadle, Senior Manager of Sales Activation at Spectrum Reach, addressed the gap between consumer behavior and industry vocabulary directly. "The way people watch video has changed dramatically, but the language the industry uses to describe it hasn't kept pace," Cheadle said. "As video continues to evolve across platforms, screens, and viewing experiences, establishing a common framework is essential to reducing complexity, improving collaboration, and helping buyers and sellers make more informed decisions."

The agentic AI dimension

Beyond current-day planning and buying workflows, the standard's documentation raises a forward-looking rationale tied to automated advertising systems. The framework is intended to support participants ranging from a chief marketing officer setting cross-platform video strategy to an engineer building the underlying infrastructure. As agentic workflows accelerate, according to the standard, a shared language stops being optional. Without definitional alignment, the document states, agents acting on behalf of advertisers and sellers may produce costly and consequential errors.

That concern connects to broader work already underway inside IAB Tech Lab. The organization outlined an agentic roadmap on January 6, 2026, extending OpenRTB, AdCOM, and VAST with modern execution protocols intended to scale AI agent deployment without fragmenting the ecosystem through incompatible standards. If autonomous agents are going to negotiate and execute video ad transactions on behalf of human buyers and sellers, the underlying classification of what is actually being transacted needs to be machine-readable and consistent, a requirement that human-mediated transactions could historically work around through judgment calls and side conversations.

Measurement context behind the push

The RMT Standard's emphasis on interoperable reporting also connects to measurement research IAB published earlier in 2026. The organization's State of Data 2026 report, covered by PPC Land following its February 7, 2026 release, found that up to 75% of marketers say attribution, incrementality tests, and marketing mix models underperform on rigor, timeliness, trust, and efficiency. That report also estimated that artificial intelligence could unlock approximately $26 billion in media investment and $6 billion in productivity value, contingent on the data feeding those systems being consistent and structured.

The RMT Standard does not claim to solve measurement inconsistency on its own. It operates upstream of that problem, establishing what a video impression is before addressing how its performance gets measured. Consistent classification is a precondition for consistent measurement, not a substitute for it. Whether the standard closes the gap identified in IAB's own measurement research will depend on adoption across a video ecosystem that spans hundreds of platforms with differing incentives, a dynamic that has complicated prior IAB Tech Lab standardization efforts, including a dispute with Prebid.org over transaction ID implementation in August 2025.

Structure of the public comment process

IAB set the comment period to run from July 9 through August 8, 2026, a 30-day window during which brands, agencies, publishers, ad tech partners, networks, and other stakeholders can submit input. IAB and IAB Tech Lab stated they will continue working with industry stakeholders, working group participants, and standards contributors to refine the framework following the comment period, though the announcement did not specify a target date for a finalized version.

That structure mirrors the comment-then-refine pattern IAB Tech Lab used for the Programmatic Auction Definitions document, which entered public comment on January 29, 2026 with a period extending through February 27, 2026, and for Campaign Data Standards 1.0, whose comment period ran from May 14 through June 10, 2026 ahead of a planned finalization in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Insight for the marketing community

For PPC Land readers working across paid media, ad operations, and platform strategy, the RMT Standard matters less for its immediate operational impact, since nothing changes for campaigns running today, and more for what it signals about the direction of video classification infrastructure over the next several quarters. Advertisers and agencies that plan cross-platform video campaigns currently reconcile terminology manually between planning tools, DSPs, and reporting dashboards, a friction point that PPC Land has tracked across its coverage of IAB's Campaign Data Standards work. If the RMT Standard's viewing-bucket and impression-attribute framework gets adopted broadly and encoded into OpenRTB as intended, that reconciliation burden could shrink, though adoption timelines for IAB Tech Lab standards have historically varied by how directly a change affects existing revenue models on the sell side.

Publishers and platforms have a narrower but more immediate interest: how their existing inventory gets mapped onto the new viewing buckets and impression attributes will affect how that inventory gets packaged and sold going forward. Media buyers focused on connected television and FAST inventory in particular may want to examine how the standard's viewing buckets intersect with existing CTV ad format work IAB Tech Lab published in December 2025, since campaigns spanning both frameworks will need consistent treatment across both documents.

The 30-day comment window closing August 8, 2026 represents the practical opportunity for industry input before the framework moves toward finalization. Given IAB Tech Lab's stated intent to encode the classification directly into OpenRTB bid requests and Project Eidos taxonomy fields, organizations with existing bidstream infrastructure have a direct stake in how the second-layer impression attributes get defined in the final version.

Timeline

  • December 11, 2024: IAB Tech Lab announces content taxonomy updates including CTV genre classifications, addressing free-text genre limitations in OpenRTB.
  • February 4, 2025: IAB Tech Lab clarifies video placement definitions through the plcmt attribute, addressing implementation questions dating to March 2023.
  • December 11, 2025: IAB Tech Lab publishes CTV ad format standards covering six formats including pause ads and menu ads.
  • January 6, 2026: IAB Tech Lab unveils an agentic roadmap extending OpenRTB, AdCOM, and VAST with modern execution protocols for AI agent deployment.
  • January 29, 2026: IAB Tech Lab's Programmatic Auction Definitions document enters public comment, running through February 27, 2026.
  • February 7, 2026: IAB publishes its State of Data 2026 report, finding up to 75% of marketers say advanced measurement approaches underperform.
  • May 14, 2026: IAB releases Campaign Data Standards 1.0, the first output of Project Eidos, for public comment through June 10, 2026.
  • July 9, 2026: IAB releases the Redefining Media Types Standard for public comment, with IAB Tech Lab establishing the underlying technical standards.
  • August 8, 2026: Public comment period for the Redefining Media Types Standard closes.

Summary

Who: The Interactive Advertising Bureau, in partnership with IAB Tech Lab, released the standard. Jamie Finstein, VP of Media Center at IAB, and Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, provided the primary framing quotes in the announcement. Industry representatives from Media.net, Horizon Media, NBCUniversal, and Spectrum Reach also provided supporting statements.

What: IAB released the Redefining Media Types Standard for public comment, a two-layer classification framework for digital video advertising. IAB describes the first layer as organizing video environments into four macro buckets grounded in consumer viewing experience, though the announcement names three: lean back viewing, personal screen viewing, and passive and communal viewing. The second layer applies eight binary impression-level attributes, including sound state, skip-enabled versus completion-required status, full-screen presentation, addressability, availability of signals, measurability, device, and ad formats.

When: The standard was announced July 9, 2026. The public comment period runs through August 8, 2026, a 30-day window.

Where: IAB is headquartered in New York City. The standard applies globally to digital video advertising ecosystems spanning connected TV, online video, social video, free ad-supported streaming television, video podcasting, and retail video.

Why: Legacy media classification terms were built to describe distribution technology and business models rather than consumer viewing experience, according to IAB. That mismatch has produced misaligned planning across brands and agencies, packaging confusion for publishers and platforms, and interoperability gaps for ad tech and measurement providers. The standard is designed to establish a shared vocabulary ahead of broader adoption of agentic AI workflows in advertising, where the absence of definitional alignment could produce costly errors as automated systems execute transactions without human judgment to resolve ambiguity.