• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 30, 2009

The IAB Thursday announced the inaugural meeting of a new advisory group to recommend changes to standard interactive ad formats. For the first time, agency creative executives will participate in the IAB's annual review of ad standards.

The Re-Imagining Interactive Advertising Task Force includes more than 20 publishers and agencies including CBS Interactive, Digitas, Google, AOL's Platform-A, Razorfish, R/GA, Universal McCann and Yahoo.

"We believe we can make interactive advertising far more hospitable to the craft and practice of persuasion by putting creativity front and center in the development of advertising standards," said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB, in a statement.

The move is part of a wider effort by the IAB to promote the creative potential of interactive media and boost brand advertising online. Earlier this year, it formed the Advertising Agency Advisory Board, made up of leaders from creative, digital and media agencies, to help improve the creative quality of online advertising.

The IAB last month also launched the Creative Agency Boot Camp, an in-depth educational program for senior marketers and agencies.

In 2002, the IAB introduced a set of four standard ad units and has since added 14 more with input from member companies and data from syndicated research firms.

The drive to develop high-impact ad formats goes beyond the IAB. The Online Publishers Association last month announced that 23 of its members including Forbes.com and ESPN.com would adopt larger, non-standard display units intended to lure more brand campaigns.

Separately, the IAB Thursday announced the release of a standard for the automated exchange of campaign data between publishers and agencies to eliminate discrepancies over whether impressions were actually delivered.

The Impression Exchange Solution is intended to help smooth the process of online ad buying and selling by providing setting out instructions for the sharing of impression data between publishers and third-party ad servers in near real-time.

"Discrepancies in interactive advertising are an enormous problem -- costing, and wasting, a lot of time, money, and effort," said Rothenberg. "Once all parts of the supply chain adopt these recommendations, everyone will benefit."

The impression exchange is a step toward the IAB's broader goal of bringing greater efficiency to online ad-buying, which still involves manual data entry and using faxes and email for actions such as requests for proposal (RFPs), insertion orders and invoices.

An interactive task force under the aegis of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Interactive Advertising Bureau has recommended standards for streamlining those processes, to be placed within an e-business format.

Among the benefits of the impression exchange would be saving publishers time by removing the need to manually pull campaign reports from third-party ad servers and reducing discrepancies in invoices through early detection of differences in impression counts between publishers and agencies.