In 2019, the ​​Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released the Secure Interactive Media Interface Definition (SIMID). This format allows Publishers/Advertisers to have a player display an Ad on top or alongside their stream. Two years later, Apple engineers released HLS Interstitial and that’s how Server Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) was born. Fast forward to 2025, DASH is getting support for SGAI and SGAI is trending. And one of the reasons it is trending is that it allows players to “easily” display new ad formats – in the form of an ad on top of or alongside the stream. Now, we are seeing demos with streams having fancy ads that fade in/out, play alongside content in the corner or take an L-shape part of the screen. But no one is telling you how you sell this space, how you signal a side-by-side ad, what type of media formats the ads need to be etc… Actually, it’s not that no-one talks about it, it’s that no-one in the streaming industry talks about it, but the ad folks (ie. the IAB) are actually working on it. And, *spoiler alert*, they talk about SIMID not SGAI. What if we (the streaming tech world) actually talked to our customers (the ad ecosystem)? What if we actually focused on what really matters: better ads for a better viewer experience? In this talk, we will go through the different cognate words that make it hard for us to understand ad people. We will of course have a couple of words from our marketing friends who are great at finding words that make everything look 100x better. Can you guess what linear means for an ad guy? Or, what’s the difference between an interactive and an immersive ad? (hint: it’s not Virtual Reality!). And what about live rewind ads – how cool do they actually sound in the ad world? We will also review the different standards bodies: on one side, the IAB (for the ads); on the other, Apple, SVTA, CTA-WAVE (for the streaming side). Have you ever met an ad person at one of your Streaming Tech Talks? I don’t mean someone that talks about SSAI or SGAI, but someone that talks about inventory, supply, and demand. Have you ever thought about fill-rates, CPMs, and what affects those metrics? We will look at what we can do to help the ad ecosystem maximise every advertising opportunity, so that generating more revenue does not have to mean more ads on more parts of the screen every time. Finally, we will talk about the trendy ad formats that are floating around and all the challenges they bring (but from an ad tech side, not a streaming tech side). This is going to be the type of talk where we all have an opinion and we all know the challenges (SGAI adoption, device capabilities, player complexity). But it’s time to get out of our bubble and think of the challenges that the ad ecosystem faces and how we can help. How do we avoid showing a cropped ad or worse cropping the most important of the original stream? May our shared love for XML (VAST/DASH) will lead us to a higher fill rate! This talk was presented at Demuxed 2025 in London, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this – learn more at https://demuxed.com