IAB’s New Standardization Tools To Deliver Enhanced Video-Ad Experiences

Tech-centric industries have, for long, been beleaguered by inconsistency and variation since it seems that every publisher is using a different technology and employing different tactics for delivering video ads. Owing to this video advertising was becoming an increasingly difficult market to exploit to its full potential.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau in an attempt to address this anomaly made important announcements that it believes will usher in consistency and standardization and also simplify the delivering of video ads. According to IAB, “All are designed to deliver enhanced video advertising experiences to the online ad industry while simplifying the technical execution.”

IAB released an update to its in-stream video ad-standards and also announced the commencement of “Rising Stars” video competition devoted to digital video. The updates, developed by the IAB Digital Video Committee, comprise of: A video ad-serving template; a video player-ad interface definition; and a video multiple ad playlist.

A spokesman for the Bureau said, “Like the previous IAB Rising Stars contest for display and mobile ads, the Digital Video Rising Stars competition is designed to foster digital advertising creativity and boost larger ad spends across multiple screens.”

IAB’s Vice-President of advertising technology, Steve Sullivan said, “A few years back, we faced an interesting problem where video ads really required different formats for each site that could host video content. All the sites had their own players – some were common, but any that had inventory that they could fill with video were custom and unique.”

The protocols are three very comprehensive technical documents that explain in details, how any publisher can create an advertiser friendly video ad, without having to create separate files for Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime and others.

IAB said, “VAST is a universal protocol for serving in-stream video ads, permitting ad servers to use a single ad response format across multiple compliant publishers/video players. VPAID is a common communication protocol between ad units and video players that enables rich ad experiences and detailed event reporting back to advertisers and VMAP is a new protocol that allows content owners to describe where ad breaks should be placed in their content when they do not control the video player or the content distribution outlet.”

IAB has the advantage of being a trade organization. It is neither an advertiser, nor a publisher, hence their neutrality, will help the ad-standards to be accepted by the industry without any qualms or suspicion.

The standards were released Tuesday at the IAB Digital Video Marketplace event in New York.