LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe has spent much of his career arguing that advertising works better when the industry works together. This week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) made that case official.
At the 2026 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Howe was presented with the IAB Service of Excellence — Lifetime Commitment Award, one of the organization’s highest honors. The award recognizes leaders whose careers have had a lasting, ecosystem‑wide impact, not just company‑level success. In Howe’s case, the citation points squarely at his role in pushing the ad industry toward open standards, shared identity frameworks, and now AI‑era interoperability.
A Career Defined by Infrastructure, Not Hype
Unlike many industry awards that celebrate flashy innovation or breakout products, the IAB’s Lifetime Commitment Award tends to favor builders of infrastructure—the people who make it possible for everyone else to innovate. That framing fits Howe neatly.
As CEO of LiveRamp, Howe has overseen the company’s evolution into what it now describes as the industry’s “essential data collaboration network.” LiveRamp sits in a uniquely unglamorous but critical position: enabling brands, publishers, platforms, and partners to connect data safely and compliantly across increasingly fragmented environments.
“Scott’s belief in open standards and collective progress has shaped LiveRamp’s trajectory,” said Lauren Dillard, CFO of LiveRamp, in announcing the award. She credited Howe with steering the company through some of the most turbulent shifts in modern advertising—and preparing it for what comes next.
Those shifts include the slow death of third‑party cookies, the rise of clean rooms, tightening global privacy regulation, and now the rapid integration of AI. As generative and agentic AI systems begin influencing how campaigns are planned, activated, and measured, Howe has argued that the industry risks repeating old mistakes—fragmentation, proprietary lock‑in, and opaque measurement—unless standards keep pace with innovation.
Under his leadership, LiveRamp has developed new standards addressing AI’s role in data collaboration, clean room interoperability, and measurement, and has donated those standards to the IAB Tech Lab. They now form part of the Tech Lab’s open‑source agentic initiative, aimed at making AI‑driven advertising systems more transparent, interoperable, and trustworthy.
That move is notable in an industry where companies often guard intellectual property closely. By contributing its work to an open standard, LiveRamp is effectively betting that ecosystem‑wide adoption will create more long‑term value than short‑term differentiation.
Why the IAB’s Recognition Matters
The IAB is not a neutral observer in these debates. As one of the industry’s central trade bodies, it has spent years trying to herd competing interests—brands, agencies, publishers, platforms, and regulators—toward common ground. Awarding Howe signals alignment between LiveRamp’s strategy and the IAB’s broader vision for the future of digital advertising.
It also reflects a growing consensus that AI will force the next major reset in ad tech, much as cookies and mobile did before it. Without shared standards, AI‑driven systems risk becoming black boxes that amplify bias, obscure accountability, and erode trust between buyers and sellers.
Howe has been vocal that AI’s promise—better efficiency, relevance, and performance—depends on responsible data use and interoperable systems, not just better models. As marketers experiment with AI‑powered planning, creative, and measurement tools that often don’t speak the same language.
The Bigger Picture for LiveRamp
Lifetime awards are as much about timing as tenure. Howe’s recognition arrives at a moment when the ad industry is once again deciding whether it wants to build collectively—or splinter into incompatible systems chasing short‑term advantage.
By honoring a CEO known for pushing openness, standardization, and collaboration, the IAB is sending a clear signal about which path it believes leads to sustainable growth. For Scott Howe, it’s a capstone moment—but also a reminder that the hardest work may still be ahead. AI is rewriting advertising faster than any technology shift before it. Whether the ecosystem navigates that change coherently may depend on how many leaders continue making the unglamorous case for shared rules in a competitive market.
Get in touch with our Adtech expert
