The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab is making the code and guidelines of several ad tech projects and industry standards, including parts of The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0, available for anyone to view and modify, in order to foster better collaboration within the industry. The standards group hopes the transparency will accelerate the adoption and make implementation more consistent.

The Tech Lab will make these projects and standards available on GitHub, a software host mainly used by computer programmers to store code for modification and distribution. In this case, the information will be open sourced, which allows anyone to access, modify, distribute, and contribute to the code.

Today, the IAB Tech Lab will make several projects open source, including the open source ID framework behind Unified ID 2.0, the ad identifier spearheaded by The Trade Desk and now operated by the nonprofit organization Prebid. It is one of many solutions that have emerged as the ad world prepares for the demise of the cookie, which has long been used to track and serve ads to people across the internet. 

Other projects getting the open source treatment include brand suitability test benchmarks and the secure ad buying standard Ads.cert. The IAB Tech Lab says more code contributions will come from engineering teams at Google, Index Exchange, The Trade Desk, and Zefr.

Putting previously separate projects into one place helps make it easier to adopt new standards and create a baseline for the industry, particularly as the ad industry grapples with the imminent loss of identifiers used to target ads like the third-party cookie. The cookie’s demise has triggered a rush in ad tech for a replacement, with some industry inertia caused by a lack of standardization around any single solution.

“There’s been a push to developing open source,” says Shailley Singh, acting general manager and senior vice president, product management, IAB Tech Lab. “Expanding a standard is much faster and better when it’s in an open source and collaborative environment. That’s been our objective, to ensure things are adopted faster and more consistently.”

Singh says anyone can contribute to the projects, although for a proposal to be reviewed by the IAB Tech Lab’s Architecture Group it must be formally submitted. (The Architecture Group consists of companies “governing” the project, including GroupM, Oracle, Tapad and The Trade Desk.) The group will then evaluate the proposal and send those approved into incubation, eventually giving it the infrastructure needed to support widespread implementation. 

Open sourcing will also extend to technical standards used by the ad industry, says Singh. “We’re looking for anything that supports the digital advertising industry,” he says. “Anything related to identity and privacy, management of data, accountability, supporting the programmatic ecosystem, and other parts of the workflow.”