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David Cohen, a boy from Queens who grew up to run the IAB, now spends his days holding together the world’s most gloriously dysfunctional family — the digital advertising industry. He’s the guy every brand, platform, and publisher calls when the circus tent starts to collapse, and somehow, he’s the one still smiling through the smoke.

“I’ve been at the IAB for five and a half years,” he says, half in disbelief, half in defiance. “The first two were during the pandemic, so it’s been… atypical.” That’s a polite way of saying he took over while the internet was melting down — third-party cookies dying, AI rewriting the playbook, and everyone from TikTok teens to CTV giants fighting for the same 30 seconds of attention.

Cohen isn’t a bureaucrat; he’s a field medic. When I ask him what his day-to-day feels like, he laughs — “It’s like building a plane while flying it.” Which is corporate-speak for: the engines are on fire, the passengers are screaming, and we’re drafting the flight manual in real time.

For thirty years, the ad industry lived by a simple gospel: search → site → monetize. Search drove people to a website, the website buried them in ads, and someone — fine, usually Google — got rich enough to buy a fleet of Teslas. But as Cohen puts it, “That mnemonic is being turned upside down.”

AI didn’t just break the system — it torched the conveyor belt that built the digital economy. “The role that AI is playing is rewriting the rules of everything we architected for the past 30 years,” he says. In other words: the map’s now AI-generated, it’s probably wrong, and the goldmine wants a privacy disclosure before you start digging.

The problem? Everyone’s still acting like it’s 2014. Marketers keep trying to run the old playbook, publishers keep praying for traffic that never comes, and tech vendors keep promising that their new dashboard will save humanity. “We’re an industry that grows double digits every year,” Cohen says. “But the question is — are we growing with guardrails, or just flooring it off a cliff?”

Here’s the truth about the IAB: it’s a referee without a whistle, trying to moderate a dodgeball match where the players are holding flamethrowers. Cohen laughs about it because, really, what else can you do? “We’re a standard-setting body, but everything we do is volunteer. We’re not an enforcement organization. We can’t make anyone do anything.”

So how does anything get done? Money. When Procter & Gamble once threatened to cut off ad dollars to companies that ignored viewability standards, the industry suddenly discovered religion. “When the money is behind something,” Cohen says, “things happen.”

The rest of the time? It’s diplomacy, caffeine, and chaos management. “The challenge is getting everyone to park their competitive spirits at the door and do something for the greater good.” Which, in ad tech, is basically asking a pack of wolves to form a book club.

There’s a running joke that the IAB exists just to serve Big Tech — the alleged middleman for Google, Meta, and friends. Cohen rolls his eyes. “If only,” he says, smirking. “I’d have a much bigger office.”

He’s used to the accusation. “People think we’re in the pocket of the platforms, or that we’re losing our way,” he says. “But our mission is to grow the digital economy for everyone — agencies, brands, ad tech, publishers, and platforms.” The IAB, in his mind, is the one place where everyone can argue in the same room without collapsing the tent.

Still, herding this crew isn’t for the faint of heart. “It’s like hosting Thanksgiving dinner for rival magicians,” he says. “Everyone’s got a trick, no one uses the same deck, and someone always insists the turkey’s imaginary.”

Cohen’s job isn’t about perfection; it’s about persistence. “Progress over perfection,” he says. “Getting sh*t done.” That’s not bravado — it’s survival instinct. The ad world’s running on fumes of old models and shiny acronyms, and Cohen’s the guy still holding the duct tape while the engines sputter.

The model’s broken. The standards are optional. The referee is out of breath. But for David Cohen, the boy from Queens who now pilots the industry’s most chaotic rocket, this is the ride he signed up for.

And somehow, through the turbulence, he’s still laughing — because if you’re going to rebuild the internet midair, you might as well enjoy the view.

If there’s one thing David Cohen has made clear, it’s that the digital advertising industry isn’t just evolving — it’s being rebuilt in mid-air, with duct tape, caffeine, and sheer persistence. His years leading the IAB have shown that survival in this business isn’t about having the right playbook; it’s about knowing when to throw the old one out.

The biggest lesson is that adaptability trumps perfection. Cohen’s “build the plane mid-air” metaphor isn’t self-deprecating humor — it’s an operational philosophy. In a world where AI, privacy regulations, and creator-driven economies rewrite the rules every month, waiting for perfect solutions is a luxury no one can afford. Cohen’s insistence on “progress over perfection” isn’t about lowering standards; it’s about learning fast enough to stay relevant. The only constant now is flux — and those who can’t iterate in public, under pressure, will get left behind.

Cohen’s IAB also proves that standards are only as strong as the incentives behind them. For all the talk of collaboration, the IAB can’t legislate order; it can only coordinate ambition. Real adoption happens when commercial interests align. When Procter & Gamble tied budgets to the adoption of viewability standards, everyone snapped to attention. It wasn’t governance — it was gravity. Cohen understands that in an ecosystem built on competition and ego, the invisible hand of economics enforces more discipline than any set of voluntary guidelines ever will.

Another key takeaway is that the industry’s centers of gravity are shifting — permanently. The power once concentrated in legacy publishers has migrated to creators, commerce media, and streaming platforms. Cohen doesn’t resist that change; he codifies it. His willingness to treat the creator economy and retail media as legitimate, measurable marketplaces — not fads — reflects a pragmatic understanding that influence now moves horizontally, not top-down. Leadership in this environment means building frameworks for the new power players, not mourning the decline of the old ones.

What Cohen is really doing is turning chaos into infrastructure. The IAB’s work on CTV ad formats, AI guidelines, and commerce media standards isn’t glamorous — it’s triage that keeps the ecosystem from imploding. Every initiative reflects a kind of quiet heroism: taking an unregulated, fragmented industry and giving it some rules, however imperfect, so that the next stage of growth can actually happen.

The larger lesson from all of this is both humbling and hopeful. Enduring progress in this industry — or any industry reshaped by AI — requires letting go of legacy mental models, fostering cooperation among rivals, and learning to lead inside ambiguity. Cohen doesn’t claim to have solved the chaos; he’s just made peace with it. And maybe that’s the real blueprint for the next generation of leaders: don’t wait for clarity. Build anyway.

When David Cohen talks about creators, it’s not with the corporate stiffness you expect from a trade group CEO. He sounds more like a guy both impressed and mildly alarmed by what he’s seeing. “Creators are here to stay,” he tells me. “They are not a flash in the pan. They are the next generation of content studios.”

He’s got receipts. The IAB’s research shows 1.5 million full-time equivalent creators in the U.S. alone. “This is a mass-scaled audience-building, audience-satisfying economy,” Cohen says. “Whether it’s 250 billion or half a trillion dollars—it’s not a gold rush. It’s the next generation of content studios.”

And yes, he’s part of that audience. “There’s absolutely no doubt I’ve bought things I don’t need,” he admits. “I’ve seen them because a creator brought them into my hand on my phone or into my living room.”

That’s when he tells me the Crocs story. He laughs. “I bought a pair of Crocs and my wife absolutely hates them.” Then, with the honesty of a man who knows he’s lost that argument: “They’re so comfortable. I’ve actually bought multiple pairs—and she’s not loving that at all.”

Cohen’s not wrong. Creators drive culture now. They’re not waiting for ad budgets; they’re building empires with ring lights and sarcasm. When I asked whether Hollywood or a TikTok prankster would get the brand budget, Cohen wouldn’t play favorites: “It depends on the audience, the product, the budget. There’s a role for both. It’s not binary.”

Still, the chaos bothers him. “Brands keep telling us it would be great for IAB to spend time putting some order to the chaos in the creator economy,” he says. “There aren’t standards for how creators are identified, contracted, or measured.” So the IAB is getting involved — trying to create structure in the most unstructured part of media.

The conversation turns to the fastest-growing buzzword in advertising — commerce media. Cohen doesn’t blink. “The pandemic changed commerce forever,” he says. “We lived our lives entirely digitally for two years. Budgets that were spent on end caps and shelf placements weren’t being used. The industry was born out of that.”

What started as retail media has exploded. “There are 235 commerce media networks in existence,” he says. “The question is — can the industry support all that? Will there be consolidation? That’s an open question.”

But he’s bullish on the long-term play. “Commerce media is a 60-plus billion dollar business today,” Cohen notes. “It’ll go up to 118 or 120 billion in the next couple of years.”

He points to one example that actually worked. “Chase did a 30-day campaign with Air Canada,” he says. “It had clear, measurable results — new customers, new revenue. You wouldn’t think Chase would be fertile ground for marketing, but it worked.”

And he wants brands to stop treating commerce media like it’s just the checkout aisle of marketing. “It’s been largely relegated to lower-funnel activity,” he says. “But it can work across the funnel — awareness, consideration, purchase, repeat.” The challenge, as always: getting the industry to think beyond short-term sales and buzzwords.

When I bring up streaming, Cohen doesn’t sugarcoat it. “Your experience isn’t off base,” he says after I tell him Netflix ads look like they were rendered on Windows 95. “There’s opportunity in the streaming space to up-level.”

He remembers when Hulu was experimenting with ad formats—the early days of innovation. Now, he says, “We have work to do on ad load, on frequency management, on personalization.”

Still, he’s clear about the trajectory: “Streaming will be the de facto vehicle by which video is consumed. There’s no doubt about that.”

But right now? It’s a jungle. “If you’re on Roku, the Roku Channel is very different than Netflix, which is very different than Disney+, which is very different than Fubo,” he says. “One of the things we’re doing with the Tech Lab is standardizing ad formats so the industry can scale more rapidly.”

The plan: gather input from every major streaming platform and publish a standard set of ad formats for CTV. “We asked the industry to give us all the ways they’re doing QR codes, pushdowns,” Cohen explains. “We’re going to come up with standards to help the business scale in a more meaningful way.”

Creators are taking the wheel. Commerce media is printing money (for now). Streaming is still trying to decide if it’s television or TikTok. And the IAB? It’s the closest thing this industry has to a therapist—one who’s trying to fix everyone’s marriage to data while the house burns down.

Cohen’s not panicking. “We’re definitely an industry of innovation,” he says. “The challenge is making sure we’re setting ourselves up for future success, not just a quick hit to the bottom.”

The man’s building a plane mid-air, and somehow, it’s still flying.