Anthony Katsur, a digital ad vet with over 20 years of experience, has been named the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab.
At a time when the digital advertising business is in upheaval, digital advertising veteran Anthony Katsur is a writer who lives in New York City has been appointed CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, a worldwide organization that supports common standards and technologies for digital advertising.
The appointment comes just weeks after Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced that it would postpone its planned removal of third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, a win for the IAB Tech Lab, which was among a chorus of industry voices urging Google to give the industry more time to prepare for the change. Advertisers purchase targeted digital advertisements using cookies, which are data files implanted in browsers.
Anthony Katsur
IAB Tech Lab provided this image.
Apple Inc.’s own policy changes surrounding consumer monitoring on the iPhone, on the other hand, are already having an impact on the digital advertising sector.
Mr. Katsur said that he plans to concentrate on issues such as establishing common frameworks and standards for the growing connected-TV sector, increasing security, and combating ad fraud.
One of his first efforts will be the establishment of the IAB Tech Lab Transparency Center, which will allow buyers and sellers of digital advertising to discover what standards their partners adhere to in terms of privacy and other issues, as well as whose compliance programs have certified them.
Mr. Katsur said, “It becomes, in effect, this single-source dictionary or encyclopedia of precisely how suppliers or publishers in the business are complying with things like consumer privacy frameworks.”
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Mr. Katsur was a senior vice president of Nexstar Media Group Inc., the biggest local television and media business in the United States, where he was responsible for digital strategy, corporate growth, and operations. Sonobi, Rubicon Project, MediaMath, and DoubleClick were among the businesses where he had held executive positions.
Dennis Buchheim, who departed in May after four years to accept a job at Facebook Inc., is his successor.
“We’re at a moment in the business when we’re rethinking everything we’ve done over the last two decades,” said David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, or IAB, a trade organization for digital advertising in the United States that collaborates closely with the tech lab. “Tony has spent his whole career in the trenches, in the weeds, in the mud, getting things done at the strategic and operational levels, which I believe is critical.”
Mr. Katsur’s work at Nexstar included tests that revealed how reliant publishers were on Google’s advertising technologies. Now that Google is on the board of the tech lab, he wants to keep the lines of communication open.
Mr. Katsur said, “It’s not like you can go past Google as an industry.” “Having continuous contact and cooperation with Google to push the sector forward is better for the ecosystem.”
Keach Hagey can be reached at keach.hagey@wsj.com.
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