IAB Standardizes Ad Terms to Accelerate Direct Buys

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) proposed new terms for voluntary use in contracts for direct buys of digital advertising.

The Direct Buy Addendum v1.0 covers sponsorships, audience extensions and other direct buys, the trade association for the digital advertising industry said in a Thursday (Feb. 12) press release .

The addendum and updates to IAB’s General Terms for Digital Advertising Agreements (v1.1) and Order-Specific Terms for IOs are open for public comment through March 31, according to the release.

The new direct buy addendum is designed to provide a modular legal framework to simplify direct digital advertising agreements, the release said. It aims to streamline negotiations, reduce legal friction, increase efficiency, and improve data quality and measurement transparency, per the release.

The addendum features a modular structure so that companies can adopt it as-is or select elements to incorporate into their existing contracts, according to the release.

It was developed with the participation of more than 200 IAB-member holding companies, agencies, brands, publishers, ad tech firms and law firms, per the release.

“These updated terms reflect how digital advertising operates today, and reflect a clear realization that we need to move away from bespoke, custom addenda in the ecosystem,” IAB CEO David Cohen said in the release. “This release simplifies outdated, fragmented contracts and replaces them with a shared foundation built by the industry, for the industry.”

The direct buy addendum is part of a larger effort by IAB to provide new standard terms to streamline negotiations for brands, publishers and platforms and eliminate the need to start every deal from scratch, Angelina Eng , vice president, Measurement, Attribution and Data Center at IAB, and Michael Hahn , executive vice president and general counsel at IAB and IAB Tech Lab, wrote in a December blog post.

“It’s about replacing confusion with clarity, friction with trust, and paperwork with progress,” they wrote in the post.

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