IAB Tech Lab, an independent consortium that develops and helps ad tech companies to embrace technical standards, acquires DigiTrust, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the digital experience of the consumers.

“Both IAB Tech Lab and DigiTrust exist to create standards and software that benefit members worldwide”

In a press release, IAB Tech Lab announced that it has acquired the assets and merged the team of DigiTrust with its own. Besides continuing to offer the DigiTrust service separately, it plans to apply the DigiTrust technology to IAB products, services, and technical standards (In other words, wherever it is possible).

DigiTrust service?

DigiTrust is aiming to better the web experience of the readers by eliminating the conventional ‘ID Syncing’ process that happens on the web. DigiTrust offers ‘anonymous user tokens’ that can be used by publishers and advertisers to optimize syncing and reduce page requests/load time.

“Audience recognition is central to ad relevance and effectiveness, privacy and consent, measurement, attribution, anti-fraud efforts, brand safety, and more. DigiTrust’s service provides a neutral ID that is useful on its own and also serves as a baseline for related commercial offerings. Our vision is to bring together Tech Lab’s expertise and technical standards portfolio with DigiTrust’s footprint, storage mechanism, and real-time services, to help move the industry forward in audience recognition, privacy controls, and more.”

– Dennis Buchheim, Senior Vice President, and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab

Any Immediate Plans?

Yes, IAB Tech Lab says DigiTrust’s technology and Service could provide “additional infrastructure” to the GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework, an initiative to help the advertising industry comply with EU privacy policies and GDPR. It will use technology to complete/optimize the framework.

What’s the catch?

As we all know, IAB Tech Lab has been working to drive the digital advertising ecosystem towards a brighter future. It recently released OM SDK, to tackle viewability and have been announcing plans to advance the industry altogether.

On the other hand, DigiTrust is a SaaS modeled organization. With this partnership, IAB Tech Lab

May work on its “User Experience Solutions” which includes addressing latency.

May accelerate its “Research Division” which deals with web browsers, consumer experience, data transfer, and handling, etc.

May offer a range of products to approach long-hauled industry issues (Standard Viewability Tracking, Transparency in Programmatic Advertising, etc.) similar to its Ads.txt project .

Notable Statements

IAB Tech Lab members will have access to DigiTrust which will improve the match rates and increase the supply. Publishers aren’t required to pay anything while buy-side members are expected to pay a fee when they use the service.

As per the consumer policy, neither DigiTrust nor IAB Tech Lab will collect, share, process, or sell any users’ personal information.

IAB Tech Lab will continue to be neutral-consortium avoiding buying, selling, and trading any media. DigiTrust will be driven by a separate working group called ‘DigiTrust Working Group’, managed by the Tech Lab.

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