• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, June 9, 2015

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a leader in developing and implementing industry standards in an effort to raise the overall quality of digital advertising, on Monday announced that its Tech Lab has taken over management of the Open Video Viewability ("OpenVV") initiative.

OpenVV was launched just over two years ago by TubeMogul, BrightRoll, Innovid, LiveRail and SpotXchange. The open-source tool measures the viewability of video advertisements.

The OpenVV initiative was a little ahead of its time, as the Media Rating Council’s (MRC) definition of video viewability was not put into effect until last year. But while the MRC’s definition gave the industry a standard to congregate around, viewability has clearly been a top-of-mind topic for some time.

The IAB’s Tech Lab, which formed late last year, is focused on research and development. “The ‘Open Video Viewability’ project fits squarely into our sweet spot,” stated Scott Cunningham, SVP of technology and ad operations, IAB and general manager of the IAB Tech Lab.

Real-Time Daily asked Cunningham why it fits in the “sweet spot,” and he said it does so because the “IAB Tech Lab was built to resolve friction in the supply chain that lead to expensive deployments, partnerships, and more.  Standards resolve friction, but so do common code libraries. OpenVV will help enable consistency through code deployments of verification signals for video.

“The Tech Lab is about making sure the global market has the tools necessary -- all easy-to-access from a centralized source -- to help transition to standards, whether the standard is MRC, IAB Tech Lab-distributed, or disseminated by other organizations,” Cunningham added.

Short-term goals include widening adoption of the OpenVV technology, but Cunningham noted that the long-term goals of initiative are “difficult to forecast.” With OpenVV being open source, it’s flexible to change as the industry sees fit.

However, Cunningham asserted the IAB does not intend to alter the OpenVV project in any way. The only difference, he acknowledged, is that the IAB Tech Lab requires registration to access the code (which is still free).

The news that the IAB is taking over the tech reminds us all how fast things change in this industry. OpenVV launched almost exactly two years ago, but since then much has changed. TubeMogul, which spearheaded OpenVV, has since gone public; BrightRoll has been acquired by Yahoo; LiveRail has been purchased by Facebook; and SpotXchange has sold the majority of its company to RTL Group. Innovid is still kicking, having just raised $10 million in a new round of funding.

"It is amazing to think back and realize that over two years ago — when TubeMogul developed the first version of OpenVV code and decided to make it open source — advertisers hoping to measure video viewability faced a messy patchwork of differing, proprietary solutions. We've come a long way," stated Keith Eadie, chief marketing officer of TubeMogul. "Now that a standard is in place from the MRC, there is no better home for OpenVV than the IAB Tech Lab, which will help broaden adoption of the technology.”