Palm Springs, Calif. makes for a pleasant winter venue, far enough away from the distractions of the wildfires in L.A., but near enough for the epicenters of media and tech companies to make a long weekend to explore the issues and challenges converging on the digital advertising space in the next few years.
This report is a summary of my single day at the 2025 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM), where I had the opportunity to meet with several companies. There was lots to cover, from content generation in the era of AI to brand management to retail and shoppable ads and developing strategies for a streaming future. But being this was my first time, I focused my time on consumer privacy, which is becoming a hot issue and a moving target for those in the programmatic ad space.
Brand Purpose from the CMO seat
Considering this conference was the center of the digital advertising universe, the opening session, “The CMO Perspective,” was a good one to set the stage for the rest of the day’s events. IAB Executive Vice President and CMO Carryl Pierre-Drews moderated a panel featuring The Home Depot CMO Molly Battin, Uber Global Marketing Vice President David Mogensen and Gap CMO Fabiola Torres on the variety of ways these companies have been able to tailor each of their brand’s purpose in the light of the litany of adtech solutions and innovations.
The Home Depot’s Battin offered the company’s app as a service developed with a privacy-first mindset, especially in location services used to direct customers to products on store shelves or within the company’s nationwide inventory.
Uber’s Mogensen cited the new ads being developed for the Uber Eats service that look at other items outside of food being delivered, including a partnership with The Home Depot, where data sharing will have to keep in step with data privacy concerns. He also noted that efforts to expand some services globally often mean looking at localized needs. “I bet you didn’t know about Uber Moto,” he said, pointing to a version of the app that’s localized to traffic-challenged city centers in several Latin American countries and in Southeast Asia, where more relaxed infrastructure regulations allow for motorcyclists to provide ride-hailing services.
Gap’s Torres has similar privacy-first challenges in developing her company’s brand purpose. Torres noted the company has been experiencing a post-pandemic resurgence, and generative AI helped them to develop new revenue opportunities in-app and for marketing that targets lifelong and new customers to visit stores.
The general consensus among them is that innovations in streaming tech and generative AI have given way to fresh ideas in content creation that allows for targeting their efforts in a way that doesn’t encroach on consumer privacy.
The state and future of adtech
IAB CEO David Cohen followed immediately with a deep dive into a report on 2025 ad spending, released a week prior to his talk. The study surveyed brand and agency buyers on their anticipated advertising spending trends and strategic priorities. Notable highlights show that media buying forecasts are mostly positive in the areas of retail media (15.6% higher), connected TV (13.8%) and social media (11.9%). Generative AI also comes into play, with nearly 80% of buyers using it to plan media buys and activations, while nearly half are cognizant of the need for human oversight in making those buys and activations via generative AI solutions.
It’s worth noting that David Cohen also opened the conference on Sunday with a report that drills down on privacy concerns in adtech. Much of the data and issues explored in the report, “Striking the Balance: The Consumer Perspective on Privacy, Preference, and Personalization,” figures prominently in the track I sat through on Monday afternoon. Highlights of the report:
- Only 2% of U.S consumers are concerned about their data being used for targeted personalized advertising, while 80% of U.S. consumers are concerned about their data being used for criminal activity ,
- More than a third of consumers are cognizant of their state’s data privacy laws. However, less than half know that personal data can be accessed and deleted from data collection points.
- Consumers prefer personalized ads, and are more likely to engage, and have positive sentiment towards a brand that delivers them personalized messaging. 82% say personalized ads help them discover products/services they are interested in more quickly.
Three more sessions followed, with Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, interviewed on his opinions on Google’s digital adtech dominance, followed interestingly by a session on Google’s current digital adtech innovations with Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM Ads & Commerce at Google. And before a lunch break was a session on the convergence of events and content with NBCUniversal Entertainment’s Ellen Stone and Live Nation’s Samantha Sichel, who offered examples of brands who were able to leverage their core offerings into popular fan events and other content.
A privacy-first world
The rest of the day was an exercise in patience and focus, as I ignored three other tracks — on storytelling and content creation, data-driven marketing and marketing to streaming audiences — to focus on the track that drilled into the issues with ads and consumer privacy.
Lartease Tiffith, Executive Vice President of Public Policy at IAB led a panel on privacy regulations with Travis LeBlanc at Cooley LLP and Michael Macko who heads the California Privacy Protection Agency. This talk set the agenda for the rest of the discussions in the track.
Marko explained the role of the CPPA in ensuring data brokers maintain compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act. Marko said it’s the only agency in the US so far that provides comprehensive services similar to what the European Union provides by way of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). His agency is also fairly new and is just building its investigative staff for pending case violations from a recent data broker investigation sweep.
LeBlanc noted that he was speaking as a recently fired principal member of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that occurred with President Trump’s administration taking over the agency. Even so, he explained that the agency serves as an advisor to the US president on privacy and civil liberty policies. LeBlanc understands that companies have a hard time complying with rules that can change as swiftly as data governance changes, and those rules changing from state to state adds to the difficulty.
IAB’s Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Michael Hahn then led a panel on navigating the complexities of privacy compliance. First-party data compliance might prove difficult for most data brokers and become something of a negative, but Christine Santariga with Warner Bros Discovery insists that there are benefits, especially where consumers begin to trust how companies like hers handle their data. The added benefit comes in being able to improve digital adtech that allows for more focused marketing efforts in contextual ads.
Bill Magrath at Yahoo explained that as CCPA went into effect in 2020, Yahoo had already taken a blanket, nationwide opt-out approach with any first- and third-party targeted advertising in its data collection efforts and is also taking a state-by-state approach on universal opt-out mechanisms. There are currently seven states using the latter method.
Jason Knapp of InMarket and Cassidy Sehgal-Kolbet of LVMH North America echoed those sentiments. Sehgal-Kolbet added that AI will help with making the data richer even with data collection being minimized as companies try to maintain compliance.
And to close out the ALM Privacy Track, IAB’s Assistant General Counsel Arlene Mu headed the final panel on AI governance in digital advertising that featured Dera Nevin at FTI Consulting and Charlotte Murphy at The Coca-Cola Company.
“Everything is in flux and we could have a new law pass as we’re sitting here,” said Nevin and added, “The one we’re dealing with now is the EU AI Act.” The EU AI Act is a European Union regulation much like the GDPR. But whereas the GDPR regulates personal data usage, the EU AI focuses on how AI uses and connects that data within the context of protecting privacy. Nevin said the act “takes a risk-based approach to regulating AI systems,” with four categories of risk: minimal, limited, high and unacceptable. AI systems in programmatic advertising for the most part are in the limited risk level.
With regulations in mind, putting AI governance into practice now gets complicated and is not just an issue for legal or privacy advocates, it affects stakeholders across companies. “You need people from marketing, technology teams, finance … you need to understand what your organization is doing, and for the majority of organizations it can be a real challenge to put pen to paper and say, “this is what we’re doing”,” said Nevin. She believes a way to start is to develop a set of guiding principles and says one might be transparency. “Are you being transparent when using generative AI or interacting with chatbots?” Only when developing how transparency and other guiding principles work, she said, will then allow companies to dig into the details of implementation.
Murphy added that companies should also prepare for when privacy programs fail, “when customers or people find out that their personal data is collected or used in a way that they didn’t expect or a third party gained access to it.” Failures in the AI systems can involve reputational harm or failure to meet expectations, said Murphy. But she added that models can change over time, which means there can be computational or statistical delivery errors. So Murphy recommends early response plans, or going so far as having a “kill switch,” to pause programs.
They covered lots of ground quickly, but these were mentioned as some key takeaways: be AI literate and have a baseline knowledge of AI; mind the 4 Ps: policies, principles, processes and people; using a company’s data map to develop an inventory of data use across the organization and to evaluate risks.
Odds and Ends
There was no shortage of celebrities during the event. Ron Howard was a featured speaker on Monday, and while his session barely touched on digital adtech, he did talk extensively about the collaborative process in content creation and keeping up with new technology formats that can present new storytelling opportunities.
Actor Edward Norton also keynoted a talk but his celebrity was a sidenote to his real purpose there as the head of TV outcomes company — EDO — whose focus was right in line with the conference theme.
Other than the morning sessions and afternoon breakouts, my SmartBrief colleague Ed Meagher and I did meet with a few companies worth mentioning. This was a learning experience for me, after all, and they contributed to my newfound insights in digital adtech.
Our first meeting was with Ashley Woods of The Index Exchange, a supply-side platform that works with publishers. I didn’t attend Sunday’s sessions, but Ashley Woods pointed me to a Sunday keynote featuring The Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale’s fireside chat, where he mostly covered the impact of AI and neural networks on ad serving, as well as consumer privacy.
We also met with Field Garthwaite, CEO and Co-Founder, IRIS.TV, which focused on connected TV content identification with its IRIS Content Data Platform and its proprietary IRIS_ID content identifier. As Garthwaite noted when we met, the company was acquired by Viant Technology, which will allow IRIS.TV to expand access to a new potential client base. In post-conference activity, IRIS.TV announced a partnership with USIM, who will use IRIS.TV’s proprietary content identifier, the IRIS_ID, in refining USIM’s connected TV campaign efforts.
Our final meeting of the day was with Julie Clark, SVP of Media & Entertainment at TransUnion. The meeting allowed us to catch up with her since I was unable to attend a session on connected TV that she participated in at another track. Clark said TransUnion has partnerships with a number of connected TV platforms that “have access to a wealth of data, enabling them to gain real insight into who’s watching what and when. But it’s not just about having the most data and an off-the-shelf identity graph – it’s about having the right data and a solid, tailored foundation.” She notes that AI is able to provide some efficiencies in collection and maintenance, but with guardrails in place: “Combined with responsible and intuitive AI practices, this data can power a recommendation engine that can take in several inputs – such as demographics, viewing times and device types – to serve up content that a user is most likely to watch.”
TransUnion has been busy in the weeks prior to IAB ALM. The week prior to this event, it had announced an agreement to connect its TruAudience marketing solutions business platform to NielsenIQ’s first-party data on fast-moving consumer goods purchases. And the first week of January, it opened its platform to an API that Albertsons Media Collective built for measuring marketing mix modeling efforts.