5 Takeaways From the 2026 IAB ALM Meeting
The Interactive Advertising Bureau held its Annual Leadership Meeting (IAB ALM) the first week of February in Palm Desert, California. This year’s agenda-setting meeting for the leading trade association for the digital advertising industry was also a celebration of its 30th year.
“As the digital industry embarks on another seismic shift driven by AI, our industry must rethink everything from how we approach media, measurement, commerce, creativity, workflow, privacy, and consumer trust,” said IAB CEO David Cohen.
“As IAB turns 30, it’s not just about our own milestones – it’s about honoring the digital advertising industry’s transformation and the incredible progress we’ve made together,” said Carryl Pierre-Drews, CMO, IAB. “We’ve gone from static banners to immersive, interactive, AI-powered experiences. IAB will continue helping the industry navigate change responsibly, creatively, and strategically.”
Five highlights from the meeting.
The AI Accountability for Publishers Act: Cohen used time on stage to announce legislation is proposing to protect publishers from AI exploitation. As Cohen told AdExchanger: “The health of the publisher community is critical to the health of our overall business. … If we don’t have publishers, we don’t have content. What are we optimizing? What are we reading? What are we engaging with? It’s a problem.”
And AI companies are harming the ecosystem with some of their practices. “Every single company that is training and building these AI tools without compensating publishers is free riding on their investments,” he said on stage. “Free riding isn’t just unfair. It’s stealing.”
The proposed legislation, which the group said has already garnered interest from legislators in D.C., would mandate that companies that use the publisher content to train models would need to pay for that content. “Unless they begin to pay for content that AI bots collect, they will undermine the economic model that makes the content available in the first place,” the IAB said in a statement.
Project Eidos: Despite the proliferation of digital advances, the measurement of marketing performance is nowhere near where marketers want it to be. “Privacy regulation, signal loss, platform-embedded optimization, and fragmented data environments have made it harder to connect media exposure to outcomes with confidence,” according to IAB. “At the same time, AI is accelerating expectations for speed, scale, and decision-readiness, exposing long-standing weaknesses in advanced measurement. a coordinated, industry-wide effort to fundamentally modernize advertising and marketing measurement.”
In other words, said Cohen, “it’s still falling short of its core promise. … It’s time to address the foundational issues that have quietly undermined measurement for years.”
To that end IAB has announced Project Eidos, which it describes as “a holistic, 360-degree multi-year measurement project, bringing together industry leaders from every IAB Center of Excellence, board members from Commerce, Experience, Measurement, Media, and beyond.” Their goal: “replace today’s patchwork of channel-by-channel measurement with an interoperable approach based on shared constructs and consistent language that deliver scalable, privacy-resilient measurement across all channels, including clear standards for Marketing Mix Modeling.”
Amazon Opens Up Its Protocol: While at IAB ALM, Amazon announced that the open beta of its Amazon Ads Model Context Protocol Server. This will give allow advertisers and ad tech partners to connect AI agents to Amazon Ads through a single integration. According to ADWEEK, “instead of stitching together bespoke integrations, advertisers can rely on a shared protocol that translates natural language prompts into structured API calls—essentially acting as a middle layer between AI agents and Amazon’s ad systems.”
The Proliferation of Agentic Protocols: Amazon’s is just the latest in a stream of new protocols aimed at enabling agent-to-agent advertising interactions. While each protocol might allow agents to plan, buy, and optimize across platforms more easily, each also operates slightly differently. “One of our hopes for this year is that those standards become interoperable,” one tech exec told ADWEEK.
New Board Chair: The IAB announced the appointment of Alison Levin, President of Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, as Chair of its 2026 Board of Directors. Levin has served on the IAB Board since 2022 and most recently served as Vice Chair. She replaces outgoing chair Shenan Reed, Global Chief Media Officer of General Motors. IAB also named Alan Moss, Vice President of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads, as Vice Chair for 2026.