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DOOH GlossaryIndustry Bodies & Compliance

IAB Tech Lab

The technical standards arm of the IAB. Maintains OpenRTB, VAST, OMID, ads.txt, sellers.json, and the IAB taxonomies.

IAB Tech Lab is the technical standards arm of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), spun out as a 501(c)(6) in 2014 to consolidate ad-tech specifications under one body. The Tech Lab maintains the protocols that connect every part of programmatic advertising: OpenRTB, VAST, OMID, ads.txt, sellers.json, the IAB Audience Taxonomy, and the IAB Content Taxonomy.

Membership is open to ad-tech companies, publishers, agencies, and brands; working groups draft updates to each spec on rolling 18-24 month cycles. The most active 2026 working groups are on Privacy Sandbox interop, OpenRTB 3.0 (in late draft), and the OMID-CTV pod-level extension. Trillboards is a member and contributes to the DOOH-specific extensions of OpenRTB 2.6.

The Tech Lab also runs the IAB Compliance Programs — Gold Standard certification, Open Measurement compliance, Project Rearc — that publishers and SSPs can be audited against. A "Gold Standard" badge signals the entity meets ads.txt + DAA AdChoices + LEAN + Coalition for Better Ads + brand-safety requirements.

For ad-tech engineering, the Tech Lab's specs are the canonical reference. Any time you see a protocol like "VAST 4.3" or "OpenRTB 2.6", the spec is on iabtechlab.com or its GitHub mirror, and Trillboards builds against the upstream spec rather than vendor implementations of it.

Authoritative reference

IAB Tech Lab

See also

OpenRTB 2.6
The current IAB Tech Lab spec for real-time bidding. Adds native DOOH support, CTV pod-level requests, and ID-less identity primitives.
VAST (Video Ad Serving Template)
The IAB XML spec that tells a video player where to fetch a creative, what tracking pixels to fire, and how to handle errors.
OMID (Open Measurement Interface Definition)
IAB Tech Lab spec that lets third-party verification scripts measure viewability and brand-safety from inside any video player.
ads.txt / sellers.json
Two IAB transparency standards declaring which SSPs are authorized to sell a publisher's inventory — the spine of supply-side fraud prevention.
Audience Taxonomy
A standardized hierarchical vocabulary for describing audience segments. IAB Audience Taxonomy 1.1 is the industry default.

Reference docs

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Our developer reference covers the DSP API, partner SDK, proof-of-play verification, and the sensing pipeline that powers buyer-grade audience signals.

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