October 2016

The dotcom crash of the early 2000’s formed the start of a true marketplace for a new digital advertising economy. In the last 15 years, the media industry has in a way – been in a ‘wild west’ state. It evolved faster than it did in the 200 years prior, and that fast change caused a bit of a mess. From bot fraud to loss of transparency and excessive arbitrage in the value chain, to new tech being misused (like targeting). We’ve also somehow been drawn to buzzwords like ‘Big Data’, ‘Native Advertising’, ‘Second Screen’ and the worst one – ‘Mobile’. These cause complexity, confusion and ultimately investment going to the wrong places. These were all distractions from what should have been our focus... ...creating the best individual user experience. Over the last year, teams from over 20 companies working with the IAB Tech Lab, have created a new set of guidelines for digital advertising. These new guidelines not only help solve many of the industry’s current problems but lay the foundations for the next 15 years of digital media evolution. Here’s a summary of what the guidelines focus on... Improving User Experience Eliminating intrusive ad products – E.g. ads that pop-up over content, expand on rollover, or have forced countdowns. Improve page load times – optimized file sizes for ad creative, with a light initial load but a larger sub-load. Moving to scaleable, cross-device design sizes – this helps create efficiency for building more engaging content, that is more relevant to the audience. It also allows marketers to create a more consistent message across devices and platforms. Improving Industry Yield Higher quality, highly view-able and more relevant content helps reduce wasted impressions and improve the value to the marketer. This helps drive margins for media companies, agencies, and marketers. Consolidation of sizes and usability recommendations will help improve efficiency in the supply chain and make it easier to identify arbitrage that doesn’t add value, or outright fraud. Encouraging Industry Competition. The IAB has focused on defining high-level usability guidelines that allow for unlimited creativity within a scale-able canvas. This includes phasing out previously defined IAB ad products such as many of the ‘Rising Stars’ that had been released years ago that had specific design executions and had unique product names. The team at Flexitive has been working really hard to make the Flexitive Design Cloud an amazing tool for helping marketers, agencies, and publishers focus on improving the experience for their audience. Thanks to everyone for their continued support in helping us be part of the rebuild of the media ecosystem. Here is a link to the new IAB Draft Guidelines: https://www.iab.com/newadportfolio

Month: October 2016

A New Era For Digital Advertising – New IAB Global Guidelines Focus on Experience