IAB at 30: The leaders who built digital advertising tell the story

And but, in a room full of individuals whose job titles have advanced sooner than their LinkedIn photographs, one factor stored popping up: the IAB’s most essential product isn’t a deck, a committee or perhaps a convention. It’s the boring stuff. The requirements. The definitions. The measurement frameworks. The shared language that stops a market from collapsing right into a thousand incompatible ‘belief me, bro’ claims.

To mark the anniversary, The Drum spoke with a few of those that’ve seen the entire arc up shut, from dial-up chaos to the current day: Wealthy LeFurgy, the IAB’s founding chair; Wenda Harris Millard, a previous chair who remembers simply how naïve (and hilarious) these early years had been; Scott Cunningham, who helped push the business into its extra technical, standards-led period; and Peter Naylor, who chaired the IAB in 2012 and watched wave after wave of ‘the following huge factor’ hit the shore.

We additionally heard from IAB CEO David Cohen about what 30 years of compounding development appears to be like like and why, in an AI second, the business might have the IAB’s ‘huge tent’ strategy greater than ever.

Begin with LeFurgy and also you rapidly keep in mind, this wasn’t inevitable. He traces the origin story again to one thing virtually quaint – a commerce publication editorial that mainly stated, this new ‘web media’ factor wants a commerce affiliation. “It sparked an concept with me that I actually thought we wanted a commerce affiliation to determine the credibility of the medium,” he tells The Drum.

In April 1996, about 36 folks gathered in San Francisco to map out what the factor must be and, crucially, to mannequin it in opposition to the grown-up media associations of the day. As a result of, as LeFurgy places it, the early web wasn’t simply messy, it was “absolute chaos within the wild, wild west.”

The credibility downside was existential. There have been “outrageous claims… forward of their time,” he says – the form of traces we nonetheless hear in 2026, delivered with barely higher fonts. Companies, understandably, weren’t shopping for it. They’d a “wake me when it’s over” perspective.

So the IAB did one thing that appears apparent now and was radical then: it tried to show the market existed.

“We partnered with PricewaterhouseCoopers to do an audit of precise spending within the fall of 1996… to indicate that spending was actual and to offer air cowl for our salespeople,” LeFurgy says.

The “sticker,” he remembers, was $276m in This autumn 1996. Cohen, on stage at ALM, put the punchline bluntly: in 2024, the quantity was roughly $260bn – and the IAB has grown double digits for many of its 30-year run.

If that feels like future, Wenda Harris Millard is right here to remind you it was additionally… absurd. She remembers being in San Francisco within the very early days, looking for an workplace, panicking about being late and calling again to New York for the “handle.” The response: “OK, it’s w, w, w.”

“The explanation we lived on this loopy bubble… it’s the one factor this younger lady knew was once we stated handle,” Harris Millard says.

That’s the true level of the nostalgia: the business didn’t simply lack instruments, it lacked fundamental shared assumptions. Which is why the IAB’s early concentrate on requirements and measurement wasn’t admin. It was survival.

The rails: requirements, measurement and the best to commerce

In order for you the IAB’s core worth in a single sentence, Peter Naylor affords it: the IAB helped make digital “as straightforward to purchase and straightforward to promote as doable.” And that “straightforward” was hard-earned.

Harris Millard frames it as a sensible necessity: “We needed to concentrate on plenty of the requirements that didn’t exist… attempting to determine the foundations all people must be attempting to play by and also you want some form of a governing physique for that to occur.”

Her warning remains to be present: “The worst factor that may occur is that particular person corporations run off and resolve what their requirements… must be… That simply creates much more chaos.”

She factors to measurement as a defining contribution: “The IAB took a lead position in measurement, as a result of we promised entrepreneurs that this may be a really accountable medium.”

LeFurgy is much more express about what requirements did in these early banner years: they decreased friction. And friction in a market attempting to persuade Madison Avenue it’s actual is deadly.

“There was plenty of friction within the market,” he says. With out requirements, “700 completely different banner sizes” meant groups obsessive about technical negotiation reasonably than “creating nice promoting and nice media plans.”

That line issues as a result of it’s the throughline to right now: the format has modified, however the position of requirements hasn’t. The glamorous world of banner sizes has merely been changed by the much more glamorous world of AI governance, interoperability, knowledge rights and “what counts as an impression when no person’s a display.”

Acceleration: waves preserve coming and also you don’t get to cease the ocean

Naylor’s psychological mannequin of digital isn’t a timeline; it’s a shoreline. “There’s been wave after wave of massive innovation. We began with banners and buttons after which search after which social media. AI is clearly right here proper now and all in between is the rise of commerce and the rise of video,” he says.

When he needs an instance, he goes straight to the second TV started to grasp the web wasn’t simply “promo.” Disney placing full episodes on-line triggered a series response – NBC, then Hulu, then OTT turning into “streaming” as default.

His level isn’t simply that issues change. It’s that the IAB’s job is to cease each new wave from splintering the market into incompatible definitions.

As a result of digital isn’t a single channel however, in precise truth, infrastructure. It leaks into every little thing: retail, leisure, publishing, commerce, creators, the open net, the walled gardens and, now, generative methods which may not want ‘web sites’ in the best way the final 30 years assumed.

Transformation: from ‘midnight banner swaps’ to AI-era compliance

Scott Cunningham’s origin story is the proper antidote to any tendency to mythologize these early years. “Approach again when, I used to be the man who was on the bar on Saturday evening and who needed to depart at midnight to stumble into the workplace to alter out the entire entrance of the web site in order that we had a brand new banner advert,” he says.

Then, somebody arrived with an advert server. “I stated, ‘I like you. That is nice. Now I don’t have to go away the bar any extra on the weekends.’”

That’s not only a shaggy dog story. It’s a snapshot of what “professionalizing the business” really meant: shifting from human duct tape to methods, protocols and repeatability.

Cunningham later helped discovered the IAB Tech Lab in 2014 and right now he’s targeted on high quality assurance and compliance as a result of, within the AI period, ‘belief’ isn’t a slogan. It’s a requirement for the market to operate.

“I joined [AAM] to assist the business put collectively plenty of good high quality assurance applications shifting ahead,” he says, “as a result of I do imagine that compliance is the place we have to take issues.”

LeFurgy thinks the present AI disruption will likely be as vital because the dotcom period, however with a key distinction: we’re not ranging from zero any extra and everybody is aware of sufficient to be scared.

Which is why his prescription sounds acquainted: “Coming collectively as an business in order that we will create an ordinary so that everyone’s operating on the identical rails [and] we do one of the best factor for the patron.”

30 years of compounding and the following job for the IAB

Cohen’s anniversary framing was easy: the IAB has been on the middle of each main inflection level as a result of it retains doing the identical factor, again and again, in new contexts – convene, outline, standardize, measure, repeat.

The shift now could be that the following inflection level isn’t only a new channel. It’s a brand new actor within the system: AI that may create, distribute and monetize at machine velocity whereas concurrently elevating questions on scraping, rights, provenance and what it even means to ‘commerce’ consideration.

In the meantime, retail media is charging in as the most recent ‘wave’ and, if the final 30 years taught the business something, it’s that retail doesn’t get to invent its personal physics. It’ll want shared definitions, shared requirements and shared measurement, or it’ll recreate the chaos that banners needed to climb out of.

30 years on, the IAB’s achievement is just not that it predicted the long run, it’s that it constructed the plumbing that allow the business survive its personal creativeness.

Or, to borrow the vibe of these early conferences that LeFurgy described, digital grew up as a result of any person, sooner or later, determined the boring work mattered sufficient to prepare round it.