IAB Launches Project Eidos to Overhaul Ad Measurement Across MMM, Attribution, and Incrementality

At its 2026 Annual Leadership Meeting on February 2, IAB CEO David Cohen announced Project Eidos — a multi-year, industry-wide initiative to fundamentally modernize advertising measurement. Named after the Greek verb meaning "to see," the project represents the most coordinated attempt in years to fix what Cohen called a measurement ecosystem that is "fundamentally broken."

The Problem Statement

The case for a systemic overhaul is laid out in the accompanying IAB State of Data 2026 report, which surveyed over 400 senior decision-makers at brands and agencies. The findings are stark: while advanced measurement tools like MMM, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing are broadly adopted on the buy side, 60-75% of users say these tools fall short on rigor, timeliness, trust, and efficiency.

Perhaps the most telling statistic: zero percent of respondents believe all paid channels are well represented in today's marketing mix models. Not "a small percentage" — literally zero.

Three Workstreams

Project Eidos is organized around three core workstreams:

1. Unifying and Harmonizing Measurement. Establishing shared structures, classifications, and data flows that enable consistent language across the ecosystem. This is the plumbing work — making sure that when a brand, an agency, a publisher, and a measurement vendor all say "impression" or "conversion," they mean the same thing.

2. Cross-Channel Outcomes, Attribution, and Incrementality. Developing unified yet flexible approaches that connect media exposure to business outcomes with consistent attribution and incrementality measurement across channels. The goal is not to mandate a single methodology but to create interoperable standards that allow different approaches to be compared and validated.

3. Modernizing MMM. Creating standardized, privacy-ready marketing mix modeling with comparable inputs, consistent ROI signals, and actionable budget guidance. This workstream directly addresses the fragmentation that currently makes it nearly impossible to compare MMM outputs across vendors or methodologies.

Who's at the Table

The participant list spans 33 organizations: major platforms (Amazon Ads, Google, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Roblox Media), measurement providers (DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science), agencies (Havas Media Network, Publicis Media, Horizon Media, Digitas, Tinuiti), brands (Unilever, General Motors, 3 Day Blinds), publishers (Paramount, NFL, SiriusXM Media), and retail media networks (Albertsons Media Collective, DG Media Network).

Shenan Reed, Global Chief Media Officer at General Motors, described the initiative as rebuilding confidence through "interoperability, transparency, and accountability." Angelina Eng, IAB's VP of Measurement, was more blunt: "Past workarounds have allowed underlying issues to worsen."

The AI Layer

The State of Data 2026 report estimates that AI-driven measurement improvements could unlock $26.3 billion in media investment and $6.2 billion in industry-wide productivity value within one to two years. About half of respondents report already scaling AI within their measurement frameworks, and over 70% of those not yet scaling expect to do so in the near future.

But the report also flags significant concerns. Roughly half of respondents cite legal risks, security risks, accuracy issues, and data quality problems as significant or critical concerns with AI in measurement — yet fewer than 40% have implemented solutions to address them. AI-related clauses now appear in approximately 40% of brand-agency contracts, a figure expected to double within two years.

What This Means for Measurement Teams

Project Eidos is not going to produce usable standards overnight — it is explicitly structured as a multi-year effort. But its significance lies in the breadth of participation and the specificity of its workstreams. This is not another vague industry commitment to "better measurement." It is a structured program with named companies, defined workstreams, and a research foundation that quantifies exactly how far current measurement falls short.

For measurement teams, the immediate action is to follow the IAB's upcoming webinars on these topics and to assess how your own measurement stack maps to the three workstreams. If 60-75% of the industry says advanced measurement is falling short, the odds that your organization is in the satisfied minority are not great.