In 2026, IAB announced its strong ambitions to bring clarity and consistency to digital advertising measurement through its Project Eidos initiative. But can it actually succeed?

If there’s a persistent challenge in the global digital advertising ecosystem, which remains a systemic pain point for most market players on the demand and supply sides, it’s precise and consistent online ad measurement and attribution. 

Ever since the rise of CTV advertising, existing measurement issues have only intensified, adding new platform-specific constraints and further complicating cross-device attribution.

According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) data, for instance, in 2025 advertisers were projected to lose over 26,000,000,000 USD in programmatic ad spend due to the so-called “unrealized value of media inventory”, largely driven by the lack of efficient and, more importantly, standardized measurement activities. 

Additionally, according to the recent AdPlayer.Pro survey, over 40% of respondents admit that lack of attribution standards, particularly in CTV, remains a foundational industry challenge in 2026, which needs to be urgently addressed. 

Quite predictably, over the years industry bodies like IAB Tech Lab have developed numerous tech initiatives, designed to unify and improve measurement precision, including OM SDK, attention measurement frameworks, retail media measurement specifications, and more.

However, as of 2026, no unified, interoperable approach to digital ad measurement has been introduced, let alone widely adopted, which represents a significant gap.

Project Eidos – the New Path Forward? 

That said, the current inability to resolve the measurement crisis in digital advertising doesn’t mean that the efforts to address it have stopped. 

On the contrary, in early 2026 IAB announced Project Eidos, the organization’s multi-year initiative, aimed at fundamentally transforming and modernizing digital ad measurement as a whole, and video ad measurement in particular. 

According to IAB’s official announcement, unlike the past initiatives, Project Eidos seeks to replace a wide scope of existing patchwork solutions with a unified, interoperable approach, which is intended to introduce a comprehensive vision and consistent language to better harmonize ad measurement standards across all channels and platforms.

This approach should also encompass incrementality measurement, with marketing mix modeling (MMM) solutions being put in focus, among other aspects.  

Nonsurprisingly, AI is expected to play a substantial role in this development, given the growing attention and investment directed towards agentic AI technologies over the past few years, not to mention the enormous market potential for the decade ahead (up to 199,000,000,000 USD globally by 2034, per Precedence Research).

Persistent Barriers to Adoption

Despite the big ambitions at its core and the strong lineup of businesses, expected to contribute to the development of a modernized digital ad measurement ecosystem, from Google and The Trade Desk to Meta, Pinterest, Amazon Ads and many more, Project Eidos will likely face numerous obstacles before it meaningfully changes how online advertising operates. 

And none of these are, in fact, new.

First, it’s slow adoption. As with many other initiatives introduced by IAB Tech Lab, like Protocol Buffers for oRTB or Deals API, to name a few recent ones, the development and early testing of any new tech standard typically take months, whilst the industry-wide adoption can drag on for years. 

In this respect, while ads.txt, sellers.json and buyers.json have become a fortunate exception to this rule, SIMID, for instance, is yet to fully replace VPAID years after its initial release.

The second challenge, which partly explains the first, is the limited supply-side willingness to implement new technologies quickly. The truth is, while leading companies on the buy side are eager to come up with new, more efficient ad measurement and attribution solutions, industry-wide adoption requires significant involvement from publishers, too. Those, however, are already stretched thin after investing hard-earned money in the development of quality first-party data tech, having anticipated the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome that never materialized. Consequently, far too many of them may struggle to allocate additional operational and financial resources to the testing and adoption of new ad standards. 

What could help is the industry’s ability to provide practical incentives (including financial grants or discounted options, for instance), as well as technical support for publishers, particularly mid-sized ones, to encourage faster implementation of new measurement frameworks on their side, once they’re introduced.

Otherwise, the revolutionary vision and the passionate ideas behind Project Eidos and other large initiatives yet to be launched, may ultimately remain nothing but a well-intentioned attempt to improve the digital ad ecosystem, without actually changing the big picture.

Well, only time will tell.