NEW YORK—With more than $200 billion in digital advertising now traded programmatically in the United States and automation increasingly shaping how media is bought and sold, the ad industry is working to bring greater transparency and governance to the digital advertising marketplace.
IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body, has announced the creation of the Programmatic Governance Council, a new industry body designed to bring together media buyers, media owners, and ad tech platforms to ensure that programmatic advertising's automation and AI reshape digital advertising.
"Programmatic advertising moves billions of dollars every day, but too often the people responsible for it are not sitting together to deal with the real operational problems," said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab. "Programmatic grew incredibly fast, but the governance around how that market should operate hasn't kept pace with its scale, complexity, and automation. If we don't generate alignment quickly, we risk cementing these inefficiencies into the fabric of every transaction."
Initial participants include leadership from agencies, publishers, and platforms across the ecosystem, including organizations such as Dentsu, Omnicom Media Group, WPP, Disney, Magnite, PubMatic, Hearst, News Corp, Yahoo, Amazon Ads, The Trade Desk, Raptive, and Mediavine, among others.
The IAB Tech Lab noted that the first concrete outputs from the council will be a formal charter and workstreams, followed by an initial governance framework and recommendations connecting business expectations to the technical infrastructure of programmatic trading.
Over the next 6–12 months, the council aims to provide clearer guidance on auction transparency, more consistent handling of transaction signals, and stronger alignment between buyers, sellers, and platforms on what trustworthy programmatic execution should look like. This will help buyers direct spend to supply chain partners, providing clear value.
The move is designed to address the fact that programmatic advertising has long been described as complex and opaque. Fragmented infrastructure, inconsistent practices, and limited shared governance have made it difficult for advertisers and publishers to operate with full confidence in the system. Recent market discussions around transaction IDs, bid duplication, and auction transparency have highlighted how differences in programmatic signal handling and auction mechanics can create confusion and friction across the ecosystem.
The council aims to address those concerns by giving senior industry leaders a structured forum to align on how business expectations should connect to the technical standards that underpin digital advertising transactions.
"The scale of programmatic means agencies are responsible for navigating a massive supply chain on behalf of advertisers," said Ben Hovaness, chief media officer at Omnicom Media Group. "Our clients expect clarity about where their money goes and how media is actually traded. Sitting down with publishers and platforms to work through these issues together is how you move from talking about transparency to actually creating it."
As automation and AI-driven systems become more deeply embedded in digital advertising workflows, shared governance and clearly defined standards will play a critical role in ensuring the ecosystem remains transparent, accountable, and scalable for advertisers, publishers, and technology partners alike.
To learn more, please visit https://iabtechlab.com/working-groups/programmatic-governance-council/
