NEW YORK—The Interactive Advertising Bureau has announced Project Eidos, an industry-wide effort to modernize advertising and marketing measurement, at its 2026 Annual Leadership Meeting.
“While advanced measurement is widely used across the industry, it’s still falling short of its core promise. The time for a single-channel fix or a one-off framework has passed,” said IAB CEO David Cohen. “It’s time to address the foundational issues that have quietly undermined measurement for years.”
Project Eidos is a holistic, 360-degree multi-year measurement project that brings together industry leaders from every IAB Center of Excellence, board members from commerce, experience, measurement and media.
Working with industry leaders, Project Eidos will replace today’s patchwork of channel-by-channel measurement with an interoperable approach based on shared constructs and consistent language that deliver scalable, privacy-resilient measurement across all channels, including clear standards for Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), IAB said.
“There’s no single methodology that can answer every measurement question; different approaches exist in order to answer different business questions,” said Maggie Zak, executive vice president of Analytics & Engineering at Havas Media Network. “As media has become more complex, the lack of alignment across those approaches has become a real constraint, leaving agencies to reconcile differences instead of driving growth. Project Eidos addresses this at the foundation, creating shared constructs that allow measurement approaches to work together in a more flexible and scalable way.”
The project will focus on unifying and harmonizing measurement, cross-channel outcomes, attribution and incrementality and modernizing MMM.
The just-released “IAB State of Data 2026: The AI-Powered Measurement Transformation” report underscores the need for Project Eidos. The survey polled more than 400 senior decision-makers at brands and agencies with expertise in planning or analytics, conducted in partnership with BWG Global to understand the current state of AI adoption in advanced measurement.
It examined how AI is being applied today, what value it’s delivering and what measurable improvements it can realistically drive over the next one to two years.
The survey found that while advanced measurement is broadly adopted on the buy-side, 60% to 75% of users say it falls short on rigor, timeliness, trust and efficiency. None believe all paid channels are well-represented today in MMMs.
According to the report, the buy-side believes AI can materially improve advanced measurement within one to two years. Improvements could help unlock $26.3 billion in media investment and $6.2 billion in productivity value.
About half of respondents reported scaling AI within their current advanced measurement frameworks; among those not yet scaling, more than 70% expect to do so within one to two years.
The report found roughly half of the buy-side cited significant or critical concerns related to legal and security risks, accuracy and data quality within one to two years. However, fewer than 40% report having or planning to put solutions in place to mitigate these challenges.
It also found a shift toward contractual accountability for AI. AI-related clauses currently exist in about 40% of brand-agency and partner contracts and are expected to double within one to two years.
More information about Project Eidos is available online.
More information on the “IAB State of Data 2026” report is available online.
