Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today, ahead of his visit to Australia for next month’s IAB Leadership Summit, we talk to IAB Tech Lab’s CEO Tony Katsur about the state of play in digital advertising. And the Unmade Index approaches a new low.

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‘Data provenance is going to be one of the top issues in 2025 and 2026’: What IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur worries about

Being the boss of IAB Tech Lab, the standard setting body of the digital advertising industry, must be a frustrating experience. With more responsibility than power, the IAB attempts to shepherd its members towards agreed tech standards including around audience measurement.

In the rise of the open web, the industry broadly agreed about specs like standard ad sizes and audience measurement. In Australia, the IAB endorses Ipsos as preferred currency, and before that Nielsen.

In CTV (connected TV) though, in Australia and around the world, there’s no such consensus. That includes Foxtel at the centre of a coalition of streamers pushing for a solution from Kantar, while OzTAM, owned by Seven, Nine and Ten, takes a different direction with VOZ (Virtual Australia).

Then there’s the issue of global platforms who want to apply their own measurement and standards to their walled gardens, which tends to deliver them the results they want.

Today’s podcast guest is IAB Tech Lab’s New York-based Tony Katsur, talking to Unmade’s Tim Burrowes. Katsur be speaking on standards at the IAB’s Leadership Summit in Sydney on November 20.

Katsur is a veteran of the digital advertising economy having worked for some of the industry’s formative players including DoubleClick, MediaMath and Rubicon Project before joining IAB Tech Lab three years ago

In the wide ranging conversation, Katsur describes himself not so much as a sherrif of what was a wild west, but a constable, imploring his constituents to do the right thing.

On CTV he observes: “There are companies that may believe that they're a walled garden, but they're not. Therefore they think they can go it alone with their own proprietary forms of measurement.

“There are a lot of companies out there that think they’re a bigger deal than they are, and think they can measure themselves or have their own proprietary measurement standard.”

Among the other topics discusses are the threat that the large language models of AI pose to the intellectual property of media owners; why data provenance will be the key phrase of 2025 and 2026; whether the preparation for cookie deprecation that never came was wasted effort (he argues not); and reasons to feel optimistic for publishers.

* Tony Katsur will be speaking at the IAB Australia Leadership Summit on November 20

Unmade Index hovers over the trapdoor

The Unmade Index slipped to within a fraction of a percentage point of a new all-time low yesterday. The index, which plots the movement of Australia’s ASX-listed media and marketing companies, lost 0.51%, to land on 437.7 points. It’s previous all-time low of 437.4 points came six weeks ago.

The index was pulled down by shifts at the top of town, with Nine losing 1.3% and its majority owned real estate platform Domain dropping 1.7%. Nine is now trading at its lowest point since April 2020.

It was a better day for the audio players, with ARN Media gaining 2.8% and Southern Cross Austereo up by 3.1%.

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. The Unmade team are all in Sydney today for our Unlock conference. And we’ll be back with a text-led edition tomorrow.

Have a great day.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

[email protected]

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