• by March 20, 2001

By Ken Liebeskind

The new terms and conditions for Internet advertising issued by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) yesterday were designed to have a big impact, but only if Web publishers follow them.

David Williams, president of 360i.com, an interactive agency in Atlanta, fears that top sites, like Yahoo and DoubleClick, won’t cooperate. “I have a hard time seeing them following these guidelines,” he says, indicating they have their own guidelines advertisers must adhere to if they want to run on the sites.

But Williams also says his agency will institute its own insertion orders based on the new guidelines that publishers must follow if they want to sell advertising to 360i.com. “We hold a lot of power, we hold the dollars, so if they want them, they’ll have to sign off,” he says. But he sees these insertion orders working with second tier sites, with the biggest sites not accepting them.

The new guidelines, introduced after three years of arguments between the IAB, which represents publishers, and AAAA, which supports agencies, are “middle ground,” Williams says, offering guidelines that favor both parties. The biggest one for agencies is “sequential liability,” which will protect them from liability for bills their clients don’t pay. In the past, agencies have been responsible for paying the bills of dot-coms that went out of business, but the new guidelines relieve them of the responsibility. “For sums owing but not cleared to Agency, Media Company agrees to hold the Advertiser solely liable,” the guidelines say.

Williams is relieved about this issue, because “we had a couple of clients that couldn’t pay their media and we had to pay it. It was about $16,000 or $20,000, but it adds up.”

Meanwhile, some of the other new guidelines favor publishers, such as the one that establishes a 30 day out period, which means advertising can’t be canceled for 30 days. Since Internet advertising is so measurable, advertising that doesn’t work immediately is sometimes cancelled, but it won’t be now, which is a benefit to the publishers who sell it, Williams says.

Another new guideline Williams is pleased about is proof of performance, which requires publishers to issue a proof of performance notice with invoices. “This helps our accounting department,” Williams says. “It shows that what they bill us for is being delivered.”

The guidelines were held up because AAAA wanted the sequential liability clause the IAB didn’t include in its original plans. In fact, in the past two months agencies had their own terms and conditions they were trying to get publishers to sign, according to Robin Webster, CEO of the IAB. Mike Donahue, AAAA executive VP, “was going to publish them, but he gave me time to work with publishers,” she says. The two groups met at the recent AAAA convention in New Orleans to work things out, but it didn’t go smoothly at first. “We had 19 points of difference and i