Unveiling of the '2025 Integrated Media Strategy Guidebook' by IAB
IAB Releases 2025 Unified Media Planning Playbook to Navigate Fragmented Video Landscape
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has unveiled its 2025 Unified Media Planning Playbook, a comprehensive guide designed to assist advertisers, agencies, and publishers in navigating the complexities of the fragmented video media landscape. The playbook covers Connected TV (CTV), online video (OLV), social video, and Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television (FAST).
The playbook acknowledges the persistent issue of fragmentation in the current media landscape and offers a patchwork approach to unified media planning. It emphasises the importance of a pragmatic framework to navigate complexities in a privacy-centric media environment.
To address the complexities posed by fragmented platforms and inconsistent data ecosystems, the playbook offers strategies for unifying identity, targeting, and measurement. This includes the use of interoperable technologies like data clean rooms, customer data platforms (CDPs), and unified IDs. The playbook also guides on standardising key performance indicators (KPIs) and creative specifications internally when industry-wide standards are lacking.
The end of cookies and IDs is leading to an increased reliance on contextual targeting, first-party data, and clean-room collaboration. Marketers need to use a combination of A/B tests, MMM, outcome-based models, and hybrid KPIs to measure success across platforms.
Interoperability between video channels remains a work in progress due to each channel operating in its own data silo and identity environment. The playbook dives deep into the realities of cross-platform video planning and execution, providing valuable insights into the challenges and solutions for stitching together modular solutions like CDPs, clean rooms, and identity graphs.
The IAB's playbook is intended to help marketers navigate the complexities of today's media environment, particularly in the context of privacy concerns. By focusing on interoperability, standardization, and coordination, the playbook helps advertisers cut through the noise and execute cohesive cross-platform video campaigns in a fast-moving, fragmented landscape.
In essence, the IAB’s Unified Media Planning Playbook offers advertisers a framework to overcome challenges posed by fragmented platforms and inconsistent data ecosystems, enabling more efficient planning, buying, and measurement of video advertising across multiple channels.
[1] The source for this information is the IAB's official website and press release. [4] Additional details and insights can be found in the IAB's 2025 Unified Media Planning Playbook, available for download on their website.
- The IAB's 2025 Unified Media Planning Playbook addresses the fragmentation in the media landscape, emphasizing the need for a unified approach to video media planning.
- To navigate complexities in a privacy-centric media environment, the playbook suggests the use of interoperable technologies like data clean rooms, customer data platforms (CDPs), and unified IDs.
- With the end of cookies and IDs, marketers are turning to contextual targeting, first-party data, and clean-room collaboration for success across platforms.
- The IAB’s Unified Media Planning Playbook provides a framework to overcome challenges posed by fragmented platforms and inconsistent data ecosystems, enabling more efficient planning, buying, and measurement of video advertising across multiple channels.
