Welcome to Marco Island, and the 2023 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.

The very first thing I want to say is thank you.

Thank you for making the time to be here and be present.  We made a conscious decision to not livestream this event - some things need to be experienced in person.  We think ALM is one of those things.

Also, thank you for traveling — some of you have come a very long way — to be with us all.

Your presence here is a reminder that this has never just been a business of data and technology, but rather of human beings with passions and dreams, vision and commitment.  We are friends and colleagues first.

IAB’s premise has always been different. Our first principle, from the IAB’s founding in 1996, was that the digital future would be brighter, bigger, and better if we invent it together.  Over time, we have enlarged our tent to bring in all perspectives.  It’s never buyer vs. seller, us vs. them - it’s all of us working together.  To grow the digital economy.

This IAB Annual Leadership Meeting is part of IAB’s commitment to continue to bring the entire digital ecosystem together to invent a better future. Publishers, platforms, brands, and ad agencies; private equity and venture capital; martech and ad tech - we want you all inside this tent.

Because…it starts here.

There are people in this room, myself included, who began their careers when television meant broadcast, and three networks commanded 80% of all viewership in prime-time. Multimillion-dollar ad buys were made, placed, and guaranteed with a single phone call, based on ratings projected from boxes attached to TV sets in a few hundred homes.

Everything changed in 1994.  One can really go so far as to say…“It Started There”.  Literally.

Almost 30 years ago, an AT&T ad on HotWired.com — the first internet ad in history — had a 44% click-through rate.

Not 4.4%, or point-four-four percent. Nearly HALF the human beings who saw the ad clicked on it.

Bots hadn’t been invented yet, and fraud barely existed. There was one acronym for video — TV — instead of today’s alphabet soup. Regulations were few, and compliance was easy.

It was a simpler time. People’s big question was “what is Internet, anyway?” and not “how can we make it more complicated, or destroy it altogether.”

Let’s take a look…[SHOW What is Internet, anyway? clip]

I’m going to talk about three big things this year, and if you remember nothing else I want these to be your major takeaways.

Takeaway 1: Extremists are winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington D.C. and beyond.  We cannot let that happen.  These extremists are political opportunists who’ve made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture.

The opportunists are on all sides of the political spectrum.

One might think that personalized ads help advertisers offer relevant products to interested consumers.  Or that the ad-supported Internet delivers incredible information, entertainment, commerce and connection opportunities for consumers, society and the world…let alone the incredible contribution to our economy and GDP growth.

If you ask Asad Ramzanali, former Legislative Assistant to Democratic California Representative Anna Eshoo, and current Chief of Staff for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) digital ads are “a means for misinformation and inciteful speech to proliferate and hurt people.”