• by Kate Kaye , June 28, 2004

As publishers begin to comply with industry guidelines for pop-ups and pop-unders and consider what the future holds for other intrusive ad formats, the question arises: can ad-serving systems manage the increasingly complex needs of publisher sites?

A survey conducted by rich media and online advertising management firm CheckM8, Inc. reveals that 72 percent of respondents can comply with the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) pop-up guidelines by using built-in features of their current ad-serving systems. CheckM8 also anticipated that rich media ad units will become a target of recommendations that would call for caps on the number of expandable banners, floating ads, and the like served to individual users. If future guidelines were to suggest different frequency limits for different ad types, 53 percent of study participants use ad-serving technologies that would enable compliance.

"When a member company does research like this, we incorporate it into the final decision-making process," said Adam Gelles, Director of Industry Initiatives for the IAB. The IAB's voluntary regulations state that each individual Web user should be exposed to no more than one pop-up or pop-under ad per session per site. When the guidelines were released this April, the group said they would be finalized following a two-month-long comment and review period.

In an effort to evaluate adoption of current and future standards among publishers, CheckM8 surveyed ad operations staffers at 25 Web publishers, including ABC, CNET, LATimes.com, and IDG. All together, the participating publishers employ seven different ad-serving technologies, including DoubleClick's DART and CheckM8's AdVantage.

The majority of respondents--83 percent--have already complied with the pop-up serving standards set forth by the IAB, or plan to do so in the next few months. However, over one-quarter of publishers polled use ad-serving systems that don't meet their increasingly complex requirements. Twenty-eight percent use technology built in-house to limit the amount of pop-ups served to users. The same percentage of users have a need to apply separate capping criteria to different ad units, but can't do so using their current ad delivery systems.

"You have to look at the history of [ad-serving technologies]," suggested Oren Netzer, Director of Business Development at CheckM8. "Nobody was talking about pop-ups or frequency capping when they were developed."

According to the study, 53 percent of respondents said that their current ad-serving systems would not be able to accommodate future guidelines that might require setting different frequency caps for different ad formats or multiple caps on one type of ad (e.g., serving one pop-up per user per session, or no more than two pop-ups per user per day).

Netzer believes that when developed, frequency cap guidelines for rich media ad formats "are going to be different than for a pop-up." Released in March, CheckM8's AdVantage technology allows publishers to set frequency caps on a global level, across all ad campaigns for each unique user.

Pop-ups' share of the online ad market rose from 1.8 percent in April of 2002 to 6.4 percent in April of 2004, according to Nielsen//NetRatings' AdRelevance. Twenty percent of CheckM8 study participants have banned pop-ups entirely, while all others apply frequency caps on pop-ups. Fifty percent have at least five over-page ad units running on their site at any given time. Ten percent of those polled restrict floating ads completely.

Study participant Amy Bellia, E-Commerce Analyst at Apartments.com, notes that the site places frequency caps on pop-unders, allowing up to four pop-under ad creative units to run at one time. Using DoubleClick's ad-serving technology, says Bellia, Apartments.com can set frequency caps for individual ads or for a "family" or group of ads.

The IAB's Rich Media Task Force is currently accepting feedback on a new set of guidelines for floating ads, transitional in-between page units, expandable ads, in-stream ads, and other rich media formats that will be finalized in August. The IAB's Gelles explains that the possible need for adjustments to ad management technologies is "certainly a consideration in the process of developing guidelines."