IAB Rising Stars! AKA Why standardization and innovation of mobile adv formats is important

We begin the week energized here at mobAVE, because of the weekend, but also after a good Business Insider’s Mobile Advertsing Conference last week.

Fragmentation in the mobile ecosystem is one of the contributors of stunting its growth.  It was refreshing to hear from IAB’s Peter Minnium. In fitting mobile fashion, he delivered a small and concise presentation about IAB’s efforts aimed at their industry wide push for the standardization of mobile ad size units.

Right now, with many different devices, what’s is accepted from publishers and what isn’t, is a bit messy. This is nothing new in the world of advertising: some of us here at mobAVE have seen similar issues in newspapers for instance. Case in point: some years ago, at a 100+ newspaper group, each newspaper was adopting its own formats, had complex processes, and both advertisers & publishers were reluctant to innovate given the absence of guidelines.

When standardization was successfully executed in this print media conglomerate, it turned the water on full blast facilitating worldwide campaigns across the many different newspapers.  The results gave a boost to the bottom line and was a breath of fresh air for clients, agencies & creative departments eliminating the scaling barrier that previously existed.  While you can currently run mobile campaigns with scale, there is too much creative confusion and inefficient use of time leading to a less than compelling user experience and sub-par results for the advertiser: the whole system suffers and innovation is reduced.

IAB’s timing is right, considering that after the Facebook IPO people suddenly realized that getting mobile adv right is actually very important. We are still in the early stages of mobile.   And IAB is doing it the right [and painful] way: by letting industry leaders from several areas of the value chain chip in and  help create the standards.  To find out more, click here.  Cheers to the IAB for launching this ship!