In an effort to get out in front of the rapid adoption of ad blocking technologies – and more importantly, behaviors – the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s “Tech Lab” this morning issued a set of principles meant to “guide the next phases” of technical standards for the digital advertising supply chain.
Advertisement
Online advertising trade body IAB has formed a new set of industry guidelines for digital ads that it says will reduce the frustrations that have led to a surge in the use of ad blockers.
The industry “lost sight of our social and ethical responsibility to provide a safe, usable experience for anyone and everyone wanting to consume the content of their choice”, he added.
“Among the many areas of concentration, we must also address frequency capping on retargeting in ad tech and make sure a user is targeted appropriately before, but never after they make a purchase”.
It’s calling the push L.E.A.N. ads – light, encrypted, ad choice, non-invasive – and it won’t replace its current standards for advertising but rather provide another option for publishers and marketers who want to be more conscientious about user experience.
“Through our pursuit of further automation and maximisation of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimise publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession”, the IAB said in a bold statement about its Lean Ads programme.
Speaking at IAB Engage on Thursday, the company’s United Kingdom and US CEOs, Guy Phillipson and Randall Rothenburg, unveiled L.E.A.N (below), which has been created to combat what they both described as the “biggest challenge” for the media industry.
We can thank Apple for putting a spur in this issue with its admission of content blockers in iOS 9. “The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries”, Cunningham said.
“The rise of ad-blocking poses a threat to the internet and could potentially drive users to an enclosed platform world dominated by a few companies”, Cunningham noted.
“We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves”, Cunningham writes.
A study released in August by Adobe and PageFair, an Ireland-based firm that tries to recover ad-blocked revenue, estimated that nearly 200 million people worldwide have installed ad blocking software in their Web browsers, which could cost publishers $22 billion in 2015 alone.
The organisation said it was determined to “deal at source with the causes of consumers’ increased use of ad blockers”. But L.E.A.N.’s goal is rebalancing the Web’s basic bargain-watch ads, get free content-so that the one feels worth the other.
Advertisement
“We need to bring that back into alignment, starting right now”, Cunningham said.
