This Ad Tech Briefing covers the latest in ad tech and platforms for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Tuesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →Observers hope adland won’t repeat past mistakes, especially as it looks to develop standards for measuring how ads will work in LLMs, many of which are set to become the primary means of accessing information. Jaded observers of the past will note that the stakes have never been higher, and equally lament how the deck has never been stacked more in the favor of Big Tech, but let’s get into the weeds a bit before jumping to conclusions.
The advertising industry has spent years rebuilding measurement for a world with fewer identifiers. Now it has another complication: artificial intelligence is changing not only how ads are delivered, but potentially who — or what — encounters them before a purchase takes place.
For precisely this reason, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is developing a framework for measuring advertising served to, or influenced by, AI agents, with initial results expected in November.
The initiative aims to establish common ground on questions conventional attribution was never designed to answer. For example, if an AI agent researches products, encounters commercial messages and ultimately helps its user make a purchase, then the industry needs to determine what constitutes an advertising exposure, which signals demonstrate influence and how credit should be allocated across the ecosystem.
