I’m writing this before the holiday — it’s Sukkos, the Festival of Booths.

So yeah, I’m getting this out early, because during the holiday I’ll be offline — or at least more “sparse publication” than usual. Consider this my pre-Sukkos brain dump: part reflection, part editorial, part “I really should be cutting schach instead of writing about adtech.”

Here’s what’s been on my mind.

I’ve been maybe too zealous lately about exposing what’s broken in our industry. Digging through the nonsense, pointing out the contradictions, pulling masks off the usual suspects — it’s fun, sure, but it also misses something. There are actually a lot of people trying to get it right.

And honestly? I’m not cynical about this space. I love it — the chaos, the ambition, the endless rebrands pretending to be revolutions. I question things because that’s my work. It’s how I vet potential partners, and it’s how I stay sane in an industry that’s allergic to introspection.

The IAB under David Cohen, for example, has made real progress. Big strides. He’s leading through a completely different ad world — one where rules are rewritten in code and compliance comes in JSON. And he’s not shy about it.

So before I disappear into the sukkah with a lulav, an esrog, I’ll just say this: the industry isn’t broken — it’s just complicated. And some people are actually fixing it while the rest of us are arguing about it on LinkedIn.

Stay bold, stay curious, and maybe build yourself a booth once in a while. It’s humbling.

After editing the episode, I sat there thinking about the IAB — not as a trade group, but as the quiet regulator of the internet. The more I listened to David Cohen talk, the more it hit me: while lawmakers argue about privacy and regulation, he and his team have already written the laws that matter — in code.

This next week, I’m supposed to be sitting in a sukkah — the fragile little hut Jews build for Sukkos to remember how temporary life’s comforts are.

The walls are thin, the roof leaks light, and you feel every gust of wind.

It’s meant to teach humility: that safety is never permanent, that the structures we build are always temporary, and that control is mostly an illusion.

And somehow, that lesson fits digital advertising too well. Because while I’m under palm branches, David Cohen is sitting under something far sturdier: a roof made of standards, specs, and code that keep the global ad economy from falling apart. He’s not waiting for regulators to catch up. He’s building faster than they can read the manual. And the part most people miss? The IAB doesn’t just lobby for digital advertising—it engineers it.

The IAB writes the operating system of the internet. It doesn’t do it in press releases or hearings but in commits and pull requests. OpenRTB, VAST, GPP, privacy strings — those aren’t suggestions. They’re the functional law of the web. You can ignore a memo. You can’t ignore syntax. The IAB doesn’t need to win debates in Washington; it just needs adoption. Governments don’t regulate this system; they inherit it. By the time Congress even begins to hold a hearing, the IAB’s code is already live. That’s not lobbying. That’s regulation by syntax.

And here’s where it gets more brilliant — nothing the IAB does is technically mandatory. It’s just impossible to avoid. Cohen’s empire runs on gravity, not force. Once companies like Procter & Gamble, Disney, or Amazon tie their ad budgets to an IAB framework, compliance becomes inevitable. Nobody joins because they’re true believers. They join because opting out means irrelevance. Cohen doesn’t build consensus. He builds inevitability. Compliance isn’t persuasion. It’s physics.

It’s not that the IAB conquered anyone. It’s that everyone else surrendered to chaos. The ANA is still arguing with itself about audits. The 4A’s is stuck somewhere in a sepia-toned flashback of Madison Avenue glory days. The rest of the alphabet soup evaporated into committees. And through it all, the IAB kept coding. It outlived them all — not because it was the loudest, but because it was the only one still functioning. It’s power by survival. When you’re the last adult in the room, you don’t need to shout to be heard.

What Cohen understands better than anyone is that in advertising, whoever defines measurement defines reality. Forget cookies, CPMs, or SSP margins — those are details. The real game is who gets to say what counts as real. If the IAB defines “attention,” it defines the currency. If it defines “incrementality,” it decides who’s wasting their budget. If it defines “creative standards,” it decides what’s premium and what’s garbage. Cohen’s IAB isn’t just writing specifications. It’s defining the grammar of digital truth. And once you control the grammar, the entire industry starts speaking your language, whether it wants to or not.

Now we’re entering the AI era — and Cohen’s already drawing the battle lines. There’s a difference between creating with AI and counterfeiting with it, and the IAB intends to formalize that. Their upcoming standards around provenance and authenticity will determine what qualifies as trustworthy content. Think about what that means: the difference between “premium inventory” and “synthetic slop” could come down to whether your AI watermark passes IAB verification. That’s not oversight. That’s a velvet coup — power wrapped in compliance and delivered as guidance.

But empires don’t run on autopilot. The engineers who built the original IAB infrastructure — the quiet geniuses behind OpenRTB, VAST, and GPP — are fading out. Retired, poached, or burned out by endless debates over standards. And the next generation? They’re not lining up to write ad tech. They’re building AI, crypto, or games. If the IAB loses its technical core, standards will devolve into committee politics. And committees don’t create clarity; they create compromise. The day Google or Amazon steps in to “help” define the next “open” standard is the day the word open loses all meaning.

Then there’s privacy — the great American migraine. Cohen knows better than to wait for Congress to pass a coherent federal law. So he stopped waiting. He built around it. Instead of one unified framework, he’s designing systems that work within a fragmented reality: Europe, California, and everyone else. It’s the kind of pragmatic surrender that Washington will never understand — a quiet acceptance that governance, like advertising, is now regional theater. The IAB doesn’t fight fragmentation. It standardizes it. Cohen doesn’t argue policy. He routes around it.

And while everyone else is still fighting yesterday’s battles, Cohen’s planning for the next one: who gets paid for what. The IAB’s most misunderstood project is what I call the ASCAP of the Open Web — a licensing model that makes sure creators get paid when their content is used to train or power AI systems. Every journalist, artist, and publisher who’s had their work scraped into oblivion should pay attention. If it works, it could save journalism from collapse by turning provenance into payment. If it fails, it could consolidate control under a single switch. Either way, Cohen’s not waiting for someone else to fix it. He’s already wiring the plumbing while everyone else debates whether there’s a leak.

Cohen’s mantra, “progress over perfection,” isn’t just something he says to fill a PowerPoint. It’s the operating principle of survival. The ad industry doesn’t have time for utopia. The choice isn’t between perfect and broken — it’s between functional chaos and paralysis. The IAB ships, fails, patches, and ships again. It’s messy, infuriating, and completely necessary. Because the internet doesn’t wait for perfect. It barely waits for functional.

Still, power built on consensus is fragile. The IAB’s authority depends on trust, collaboration, and engineers who haven’t given up yet. If it falters, regulators will overreach, platforms will monopolize, and the open web — that messy, brilliant experiment — will close its doors for good. Cohen knows that better than anyone. That’s why he doesn’t build cathedrals. He builds scaffolding — something temporary, flexible, able to hold when everything else shakes.

And maybe that’s the point. The IAB isn’t a monument. It’s a framework holding up the idea of an open internet — a digital sukkah that sways but doesn’t collapse. Like the holiday itself, it’s a reminder that permanence is a myth, but the act of rebuilding is sacred.

The roof always leaks a little.
That’s how you know it’s still open.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More Than You Did Yesterday.