IAB Says Fragmentation Is Now The Biggest Barrier To Video Ad Growth.

As the digital video marketplace grows more powerful, it is also becoming harder to navigate — and that tension is now at the center of the industry’s next phase of growth.

Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO David Cohen said in Wednesday’s NewFronts presentation in New York that the collision of streaming, social video, creators and connected TV has effectively erased the boundaries that once defined how video is planned and bought.

“Consumers never cared about these distinctions — to them, it’s just video,” Cohen said. But while audience behavior has simplified, the marketplace behind it has not.

Podcasting is becoming video as much as audio, and it is emblematic of something larger occurring across the media landscape. Cohen described an ecosystem where more platforms, formats, data signals and buying paths are converging at once — accelerating innovation while simultaneously increasing complexity. That complexity, he suggested, is now one of the biggest barriers to continued growth. Cohen believes the core challenge facing the industry is whether digital video can become easier to buy, measure and understand even as it becomes more sophisticated.

His prescription is standardization. Cohen said the IAB will focus in 2026 on bringing “clarity, consistency and confidence” to the marketplace. The group plans to push for clearer definitions, stronger frameworks across streaming, CTV, retail media and creator-driven content. It is also looking for more consistent cross-platform measurement. The goal is to reduce friction in a marketplace where fragmentation can slow the flow of advertising dollars.

“Standards accelerate innovation. Shared frameworks reduce friction. Clarity and simplicity unlock investment,” Cohen said.

Jamie Finstein, VP of the IAB’s Media Center, said in a keynote that the industry still lacks even basic alignment on how to define video across platforms and devices — a problem that is increasingly difficult to ignore as content flows seamlessly across screens.

“Same content, different screens, and we already don’t agree what to call it,” Finstein said. She said that ambiguity extends beyond streaming video to emerging formats, including video podcasting, which continues to blur the line between traditional audio and video categories. The result, she said, is inefficiency across planning, buying and measurement — making it harder for advertisers to compare inventory, optimize campaigns and scale investment.

Finstein thinks the IAB new standardized definitions will help. But measurement remains an even bigger challenge. The IAB says rapid growth of digital video is outpacing the systems used to define, buy and measure it — creating a widening gap between consumer behavior and advertising infrastructure.

IAB Senior VP of Research and Insights Jack Koch said widely used tools such as marketing mix models and attribution systems are falling short — particularly for digital video — at a time when marketers are demanding faster, more precise performance data.

Between 60% and 75% of advertisers say current measurement approaches lack the rigor, speed and efficiency needed to justify return on investment, according to the IAB’s State of Data report.

“When confidence drops, spend gravitates to what’s easiest to measure,” Koch said. “Fix the model and billions don’t just shift — they get added.”

The IAB estimates AI improvements could unlock $26 billion in additional media investment and $6 billion in productivity gains within the next two years. Much of that upside would flow directly into digital video.

“Digital video has never been more creative, more culturally relevant or commercially powerful,” said Cohen. “The opportunity in front of us is enormous, but realizing it requires us to learn, unlearn, and relearn how the ecosystem works, and of course, not reproduce some of the mistakes that we have made collectively as an industry in the past.”