Scott Cunningham is an internet publishing pioneer, technology executive, and entrepreneur. He founded the IAB Technology Laboratory, the digital advertising and marketing industry’s global technical standards body, Co-Founder of the Trustworthy Accountability Group, the organization established to root out ad fraud and other crimes from the digital advertising supply chain. Recently, Cunningham is author of Defining Brand Safety Series of the Brand Safety Institute focusing on advertising and commerce support of disinformation and other fringe content channels.
Cunningham authored “We Messed Up”, introducing the L.E.A.N. ads principles focusing on enhancing user experience of digital publishing and advertising that has subsequently led to user experience standards and contributed to regulatory privacy policy globally. Under his leadership of the IAB Technology Laboratory, it has authored marketer and publisher viewability white papers, migrated all of the industry ad product portfolio from Flash to HTML5, and developed numerous tools and protocols such as the HTML5 Ad Products and now the ads.txt, sellers.json and other transparency solutions.
Prior to his work for the global industry bodies, Cunningham was head of product for Federated Media Publishing/Sovrn overseeing the advertising technology exchange and direct marketer to publisher native advertising products. Cunningham was previously corporate Vice President of Technology and Platforms for MediaNews Group/Digital First Media overseeing the digital products for 200 local news titles, 800 digital products with 70 million unique users. In additional to his technology architecture and direction, he has covered Super Bowls, Olympics, wildfires and was embedded with FEMA during Hurricane Katrina. His work in digital publishing dates back to 1994 including 10 years as one of the original architects of USATODAY.com and many Gannett editorial and commerce solutions.
Additionally, Cunningham is owner of gotHabit.com, a kids digital lifestyle platform helping kids and parents manage wellness in the healthy habit making years and he is an advisor on mHealth initiatives at the University of Colorado.