VAB Recommends New Standards for Video Audience Guarantees - Households or Persons 2+

Gives Marketers Aligned, Common Base(s) Across the Largest Media Platforms, Better Enables the Escalating Use of First Party Precision Targeting, Provides the Highest Stability

NEW YORK, Jan. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The VAB (Video Advertising Bureau) announced that it is recommending the choice of either Households or Persons 2+ as new co-standards for video audience guarantees. The recommended move to a choice of the widest and most comparable audience bases for video ad campaign audience guarantees - particularly for entertainment content - evolves the legacy buy/sell practice of guarantees on narrower, linear-TV-centric standards such as Adults 25-54, etc.

For marketers, the top advantages to adopting these new standards of maximum choice are:

• Highest Stability: Recent years of intense scrutiny in objectively analyzing multiple video currency sources has revealed Households and Persons 2+ as the most stable and most comparable audience measures across all content, but particularly so for entertainment.
• Advanced Targeting Acceleration: Widespread use of first party data-fueled targeting tools by both the buy and sell sides (e.g. agencies, advertisers, publishers, MVPDs) reveals a much less critical role for age/sex partial audience definitions as being any marketer's true target; transacting on wider standards allows for maximum flexibility in fitting inventory to precise and customized target definitions.
• Cross-Platform Comparability: Marketers desire a base for apples-to-apples comparability of relative campaign weights across the largest ad platforms they utilize for sales and brand gains. And while levels of specialized audience precision and custom means of activation will always productively exist in different forms "below the hood" of each major ad platform - count comparability on common standards is high on the marketer's "must" list.

Intended for immediate injection into buyer/seller dialogues, the recommendation of Households or P2+ for audience guarantees is seen as a thoroughly modern "win-win" by VAB CEO & President Sean Cunningham. "With 2026 buyers and sellers having such precision targeting insights refined so deeply on behaviors and identity that so surpass partial age/sex groupings, those aggregations seem outmoded and artificial. Transacting across wider canvasses, guaranteeing across a choice of wider audiences with maximum stability, and then letting the precision optimization tools do their magic aligns with how video media is activated by marketers today."

ABOUT VAB

The Video Advertising Bureau (VAB)—whose members include premium multiscreen TV providers and distributors, alongside a broader community of influential media companies—plays a dual role in the video advertising industry. VAB is fiercely advocating for the changes that bring about a more innovative and transparent marketplace. VAB also provides the insights and thought leadership that enable marketers to develop business-driving marketing strategies. Visit VAB online and access its continuously growing content library at thevab.com.

Contact: Sabrina Christiansen / [email protected]

SOURCE VAB