What is IAB Tech Lab?
IAB Tech Lab is the nonprofit technical standards body of the digital advertising industry, funded by member companies and set up by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It maintains OpenRTB, AdCOM, VAST, ads.txt, sellers.json, the supply chain object, and the Global Privacy Platform, and more recently its agentic standards, AAMP and ARTF. Member working groups write and revise the specifications.
Also called: IAB Technology Laboratory, Tech Lab, IABTL.
How it works
For OpenRTB work, Tech Lab is where the specification lives and changes. The 2.x spec is kept in its public openrtb2.x repository on GitHub, with each dated release tagged, and changes go through the Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group. Since the 2.6-202211 release the version number moves only on breaking changes, so new fields, objects, and list values arrive as dated snapshots of 2.6.
Tech Lab splits shared definitions out of individual protocols. AdCOM holds the enumerated lists OpenRTB 2.6 references, such as device types and API frameworks, and is also the domain model for OpenRTB 3.0. Trust standards sit beside the protocol: ads.txt and app-ads.txt for authorization, sellers.json and the SupplyChain object for disclosure, and ads.cert for signing.
Tech Lab standards are voluntary. The spec defines what fields mean, not how a given exchange must behave, so exchanges publish their own integration guides that add requirements, ext fields, and limits on top. When an exchange's documentation and the spec disagree, bidders on that exchange have to follow the exchange, and the gap is worth writing down.
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Related terms
Every term is in the glossary.