CTV Ad Ops Workshop: Industry Urges Consistent Standards for Growth
The IAB Tech Lab's CTV Ad Ops Workshop, held on August 5, 2025, highlighted the need for consistent advertising standards in connected TV environments. Industry experts and operations professionals gathered to address challenges in advanced ad formats, live event delivery, and creative tracking systems.
The workshop explored the potential of the Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) to uniquely identify ads within CTV environments, likening it to retail barcodes. Progress since last year was noted, but participants emphasized consistent signal usage, including ratings, genre, and content IDs, along with richer taxonomy values for improved targeting precision and inventory quality.
Existing standards like Version 4 of VAST and SIMID support many capabilities, yet adoption remains minimal. A universal Conversion API standard for TV emerged as a priority to provide publishers insights needed to optimize inventory and measure campaign effectiveness.
Significant technical barriers were discussed, with live programming, particularly sports, presenting distinctive ad-serving challenges. The IAB Tech Lab is working on an initiative to standardize convertible APIs for CTV to close measurement gaps in advertising for this medium.
Industry leaders agreed that CTV growth acceleration depends on consistent execution of advanced ad formats across platforms. The workshop reinforced the urgent need for alignment on CTV advertising standards, requiring active industry engagement to overcome operational challenges due to fragmentation across various content providers, distributors, OEMs, TV platforms, and app owners.
