IAB Tech Lab outlines critical connected TV advertising standards needed

The IAB Tech Lab CTV Ad Ops Workshop revealed significant technical barriers preventing connected TV advertising from reaching its full programmatic potential, according to findings. The workshop, held August 5, 2025, at NYC's AD Lab brought together industry experts from Meta, Fox, Videostorm, AD-ID, GumGum, and Google to identify standardization gaps across advanced ad formats, live event delivery, and creative tracking systems.

Operations professionals from major streaming platforms including Paramount, NBC, DirectTV, Samsung, Fox, Disney, and Yahoo examined current limitations in CTV advertising infrastructure during the exclusive member workshop. The five-hour session brought together ad ops leaders from brands, ad tech platforms, agencies, resellers, and publishers to assess technical roadblocks impeding programmatic growth.

Clear standards for advanced formats remain missing

Industry leaders reached consensus that CTV growth acceleration depends on consistent execution of advanced ad formats across platforms during the August 5 workshop. Shailley Singh, Executive Vice President, Product & Chief Operating Officer of IAB Tech Lab, presented the Ad Format Hero initiative designed to establish broadly accepted specifications for CTV-focused ad executions, even when requiring certain compromises on premium features.

Singh led multiple sessions throughout the workshop, including "The CTV Ad Portfolio – From Hero Concept to Real Formats" and discussions on bringing CAPI to CTV. Katie Stroud, Senior Product Manager at IAB Tech Lab, facilitated operational sessions on how to integrate these standards into ad ops workflows.

Current execution varies significantly without clear specifications. Advanced ad experiences including image overlays, L-Bars, squeeze-backs, and shoppable ads rely heavily on proprietary methods. Standards supporting many capabilities exist, such as Version 4 of VAST and SIMID (Secure Interactive Media Interface Design), which replaced VPAID, but adoption remains minimal.

The workshop featured a dedicated panel titled "The VAST Question," exploring the history and adoption challenges of VAST standards. Katie Stroud and David Sidman, Founder & CAO of VideoStorm, led discussions on the challenges created by supporting multiple versions and the resulting impact on innovation. One participant described a real-world scenario where multi-million dollar orders become difficult to execute efficiently due to this adoption gap. The lack of standardization creates barriers preventing these formats from achieving necessary programmatic scale for both buyers and sellers to benefit.

Live event advertising demands specialized technical solutions

Live programming, particularly sports, presents distinctive ad-serving challenges requiring immediate technical interventions. Current processes involve on-site production trucks, where technical staff trigger ads during breaks, initiating complex procedures to serve millions of concurrent streams programmatically.

Hillary Slattery, Senior Director of Programmatic Product at IAB Tech Lab, introduced the Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) as a multi-pronged solution during two dedicated workshop sessions: "The Live Events Problem: Making Real-Time Work for Real Revenue" and "Integrating LEAP into the AdOps Workflows." Chris White, Senior Product Manager for Google Ad Manager Advanced Video at Google, participated in both sessions discussing practical implementation approaches.

The LEAP initiative incorporates several technical components: the Concurrent Streams API has been released, while the Forecasting API is upcoming. Future capabilities include pre-fetching bids to reduce latency and network strain during high-volume live events.

These technical improvements aim to enable transacting at scale, allowing sellers to maximize revenue from valuable opportunities while enabling buyers to capitalize on high engagement programming. The solutions address network congestion issues that occur when millions of viewers simultaneously request personalized advertisements during major sporting events.

Universal conversion API standard targets CTV measurement gaps

Most TV environments provide publishers no visibility into viewer interactions with brands after ad exposure. Proprietary Conversion APIs (CAPI) exist within some platforms, enabling advertisers to share conversion data including signups, downloads, or purchases back to publishers.

The development of a universal CAPI standard for TV emerged as a priority during Singh's dedicated session "Bringing CAPI to CTV." This initiative provides publishers insights needed to optimize inventory and measure campaign effectiveness. This approach mirrors successful CAPI implementations from Meta, Google, and TikTok that have enabled demand optimization on their respective platforms.

The universal standard would standardize conversion feedback across the fragmented CTV ecosystem, enabling publishers to make data-driven inventory decisions and measure advertising effectiveness consistently across platforms.

Creative ID framework shows progress despite adoption challenges

The Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) was compared to retail barcodes for its potential to uniquely identify each ad within CTV environments. Workshop attendees received detailed updates during Stephen Walcher's session "ACIF Update: Solving Ad Creative Identity at Scale," where the Director of Engineering at Ad-ID presented progress made since last year.

Key developments include the introduction of the ACIF Validation API, through which creative IDs can be verified and related metadata retrieved from ad registries. The session covered expanded support for the Open Measurement SDK (OM SDK) and demonstrated AD-ID's API implementation to the workshop group.

Following Walcher's presentation, Singh and Stroud led a discussion titled "Where are YOU with ACIF Adoption?" examining implementation challenges across the industry. Other countries maintain unique ad registries, with several discussing Framework adoption and API implementation. However, adoption challenges persist, including determining responsibility for ad registration, ensuring IDs remain attached through the supply chain, and preventing spoofing.

Embedding IDs in audio watermarks was discussed as a solution to preserve ID integrity, though this approach requires standardization. Watermarking was identified as a potential tool to embed universal creative IDs directly into ad assets, enabling easier tracking, attribution, and fraud prevention.

The technology exists today but lacks standardization, and watermarking IDs are not yet universal. Standardization of watermarking tied to ACIF represents a potential avenue for increasing adoption, but requires industry coordination to determine viability or whether similar process challenges as ACIF has experienced will emerge.

Metadata and taxonomy improvements needed for inventory management

Workshop participants emphasized consistent signal usage including ratings, genre, and content IDs, along with richer taxonomy values. Enhanced capabilities would include sentiment analysis at the moment an ad is served, improving targeting precision and inventory quality.

While IAB Tech Lab-managed taxonomies provide assistance, many companies continue using free-form text versions or older taxonomies inadequate for current purposes, despite mapping releases to facilitate migration to more robust later versions.

These capabilities must be developed cautiously due to privacy considerations. Concern exists around balancing user privacy with content-level transparency on both buy and sell sides that future innovation may be able to mitigate.

CTV inventory ownership creates complex operational challenges

Workshop discussions highlighted complexity in CTV inventory right of sale. Traditional web video typically involves a "publisher" controlling player, content, and site or application. CTV environments operate differently.

Right of sale is distributed across content providers, distributors, OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), TV platforms, and app owners. This fragmentation creates uncertainty over true ad inventory "ownership."

Although Tech Lab does not establish business models, the programmatic ecosystem may require explicit ad revenue splits at ad placement time. Without clarity, automation becomes difficult, and models may need to differ from web or mobile advertising approaches. Ads.txt, App-ads.txt, and the supply chain object provide transparency into authorized inventory sellers, but platform interpretation of these complex relationships can lead to unexpected outcomes, especially for resellers.

Additional guidance was considered helpful for addressing these complexities and clarifying operational procedures across the supply chain.

Technical standards alignment requires active industry engagement

The workshop reinforced urgent need for alignment on CTV advertising standards. Progress depends on active industry engagement from clarifying inventory ownership to streamlining live event delivery and enabling universal creative IDs.

Stakeholders are encouraged to participate in ongoing IAB Tech Lab initiatives to ensure solutions are developed with operational realities in mind. IAB Tech Lab members in this ecosystem are encouraged to join the Advanced TV Working Group or Advanced TV Commit Group and bring proposals to solve these issues.

Organizations can contact memberships@iabtechlab.com for membership information. These issues will receive additional coverage at I Want my CTV 2025: Stream Big or Go Home in NYC on December 4.

Why this matters for marketing professionals

These technical challenges directly impact campaign execution and measurement capabilities for marketing professionals investing in connected TV. Without standardized ad formats, campaigns require custom implementations across platforms, increasing costs and complexity. The lack of universal creative IDs prevents accurate cross-platform attribution and frequency management. Live event advertising limitations restrict access to premium inventory during high-engagement programming.

Industry data indicates CTV's share of media budgets will double from 14% in 2023 to 28% in 2025, making these technical improvements critical for campaign efficiency and effectiveness. Standardization will enable better measurement, reduce costs, and provide access to premium inventory previously difficult to execute programmatically.

Timeline

• January 29, 2025 - IAB Tech Lab announces technical standards roadmap focusing on CTV ad formats and live streaming specifications
• January 29, 2025 - IAB Tech Lab CTV Ad Ops Workshop findings released identifying six technical barriers
• December 16, 2024 - IAB Tech Lab officially announces Curation Framework Working Group addressing inventory management
• December 11, 2024 - IAB Tech Lab announces content taxonomy updates with public comment period
• November 21, 2024 - IAB Tech Lab releases ID-Less Solutions Guidance for privacy-first advertising
• October 22, 2024 - IAB Tech Lab launches Ad Format Idol initiative to standardize CTV ad formats
• September 26, 2024 - IAB Tech Lab launches PAIR protocol for first-party data matching
• July 21, 2024 - IAB Tech Lab releases VAST CTV Addendum 2024 standardizing ad IDs and interactive ads
• August 19, 2025 - Kargo CTV campaigns achieve 78% higher attention than industry standards using Enhanced Branded Canvas format
• August 19, 2025 - IPG Mediabrands launches Acxiom Contextual CTV solution powered by IRIS_ID
• August 19, 2025 - Viant integrates with Wurl for scene-level CTV targeting enabling contextual intelligence
• July 21, 2025 - Innovid expands LinkedIn integration for unified CTV campaign management
• July 16, 2025 - Wunderkind launches programmatic CTV pause ads with 79% cost reduction
• July 9, 2025 - Marketers struggle to adapt social creative for CTV campaigns with only 25% developing tailored content
• July 1, 2025 - MNTN partners with ZoomInfo for B2B CTV advertising as 98% of LinkedIn users watch CTV content weekly

Summary

Who: Industry experts from Meta, Fox, Videostorm, AD-ID, GumGum, and Google participated in the IAB Tech Lab CTV Ad Ops Workshop, alongside operations professionals from major streaming platforms including Paramount, NBC, DirectTV, Samsung, Fox, Disney, and Yahoo.

What: The workshop identified six critical technical barriers preventing connected TV advertising from reaching full programmatic potential: lack of standardized advanced ad formats, complex live event advertising requirements, missing universal conversion API standard, creative ID framework adoption challenges, inadequate metadata and taxonomy systems, and unclear CTV inventory ownership structures.

When: The workshop findings were announced on January 29, 2025, building on ongoing industry initiatives including the Ad Format Hero program and Live Event Ad Playbook (LEAP) development.

Where: The technical challenges affect the entire CTV advertising ecosystem across streaming platforms, ad tech companies, agencies, and publishers operating in the connected TV space.

Why: These standardization efforts are critical as CTV's share of media budgets is projected to double from 14% in 2023 to 28% in 2025, with 72% of marketers planning to increase programmatic advertising investment, making technical improvements essential for campaign efficiency and effectiveness.