Dive Brief:

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab officially released the IAB Dynamic Content Ad Standard after reviewing and incorporating public feedback, per an organization blog post. The IAB confirmed the public comment period from last fall led to two or three changes in the original schema, as well as additional explanations of some of the parameters.
• The standard categorizes the content of an ad using metadata — IAB Tech Lab also refers to this as a "schema" — to describe each of an ad's assets such as image, written copy, animation and video. These assets can be sorted into groups and rotated or selected by ad serving platforms. Based on their data, they can be measured in detail for better personalization and creative, along with media optimization.
• The standard is applicable to all formats in use today, Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox and co-chair of the IAB Tech Lab Dynamic Content Ad Standard Working Group, wrote in the post. He noted that emerging areas including chatbot ad formats or virtual reality (VR) might use the standard. Jivox and Spongecell are already using the standard.

Dive Insight:

Last fall, when the content standard was first opened to public comment, Nesamoney said dynamic content advertising ideally takes the concept behind how programmatic platforms revolutionized ad buying and applies it to ad creation. This speaks to how marketers are looking to more quickly optimize campaigns by automating the process of changing up creative and copy based on initial results — an approach that is enabled by the growing use of machine learning to dissect data and build campaign elements. 

In an industry grappling with the challenges of a fractured, complex and often non-transparent digital media landscape, standardization efforts like the IAB Tech Lab's might help clean up the process and help marketers easily implement and accurately measure campaigns at scale. A standard would assist creative developers, ad content management systems, ad servers, and media platforms in creating, serving and measuring dynamic ads based on the user's context and other data.

Dynamic ad content allows marketers to use data to personalize ads at a more granular level, based on interests, demographic attributes and other factors, the group noted.