IAB Launches Efforts To Boost Ad Creativity, Ad-Buying

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has unveiled a set of new initiatives aimed at bolstering both the creative and business sides of online advertising. Among the steps announced at its annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., the IAB has created an advisory panel of a dozen top digital agency executives to help promote the creative potential of interactive media.

Web publishers and online ad companies have long decried a dearth of brand advertising relative to the amount of time people spend online. Among the oft-cited barriers to landing more brand campaigns is a lack of strong creative content--the kind that delivers an emotional impact not measured in clicks or impressions.

The new Advertising Agency Advisory Board brings together leaders from creative, digital and media agencies to address the issue including Brad Brinegar, chairman and CEO of McKinney, who will chair the board; Tom Bedecarré, CEO of AKQA; Colleen DeCourcy, chief digital officer at TBWA Worldwide; and Jean-Philippe Maheu, chief digital officer at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

"Our interest in forming this advisory board is to enhance the partnership opportunities with agencies that will hasten and smooth the ongoing digital transformation of the full media ecosystem," said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB. "And a lot of that will happen through creativity, relationships, and implementation."

Rothenberg had already begun a campaign against "creative shabbiness" online in public comments as well as a blog post this month highlighting obstacles to online branding, including a direct-marketing culture that devalues creativity.

The new group, which held its first meeting earlier this month, will publish case studies of successful agency-publisher collaboration as part of wider efforts to improve the creative quality of online advertising. In connection with formation of the agency board, the IAB next month will also debut its Creative Agency Boot Camp, an in-depth educational program for senior marketers and agencies.

Separately, the IAB announced a partnership with the American Association of Advertising Agencies to take steps to reduce the costs and complexity of online ad buying. The 4A's/IAB Reinvention Task Force will focus on three areas: standardization in business document formats; updating standard language in agency contracts; and improving automated exchange of ad metrics to avoid discrepancies and billing conflicts.

The move follows the recent launch of the IAB's E-business Interactive Standards, an XML-based platform for automating requests for proposals, insertion orders, invoices and other documents shared by agencies and media companies.

The IAB also formed task forces to address a pair of issues causing increasing friction between agencies and publishers--data ownership and media contracts. The goal is to figure out who owns what data and to create a model contract that includes commonly used terms and conditions for publishers, agencies and marketers.

Media-buying giant GroupM sparked controversy recently by revising the wording of its standard online advertising contracts to say that all data collected by a Web publisher will be deemed "confidential information" of the agency/advertiser. Under current industry practice, that data is considered co-owned by all parties involved in the process.

The Interactive T&Cs Task Force discussions with the 4As are slated to begin in March. The 16 companies serving on the IAB panel include Cars.com, CBS Interactive, Forbes.com, Google, NBC Universal and Yahoo.

5 comments about "IAB Launches Efforts To Boost Ad Creativity, Ad-Buying".
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  1. Michael Mcmahon from ROI Factory / Quick Ops, February 24, 2009 at 11:28 a.m.

    Does anyone else read this as big agencies and big media trying to convince their clients to spend money on branding rather than direct marketing? Big agencies charge $10,000 or more to create a rich media ad, and pay significant premiums to publishers to run rich media, yet everyone who has analyzed the ROI knows that these ads do not pay out. We can create all the engagement metrics we like, but for businesses that are concerned with ROI, rich media is still far too expensive. Perhaps rather than encourage advertisers to spend more money, we should be helping them to spend their budgets more efficiently.

  2. James McLaine, February 24, 2009 at 12:01 p.m.

    Here's a counterpoint to the previous comment.

    I think we all agree that the web is the most versatile media out there. But it has grown up as a direct response media.

    Only relatively recently has the technology made effective brand and relationship building messages possible. Even with rich media, skyscrapers and other standard ad sizes are still not engaging enough for anything but a sales promotion type message.

    There's nothing wrong with that, but if publishers want a bigger piece of the branding and RM pies, the way the messages are presented to users needs to be optimized for each type of message.

    What I believe the board's goal should be is to determine what those unique standards are, and help determine how to judge the success of each kind of message.

    You cannot measure the Superbowl spots for Cash4Gold and Budweiser with the same metrics. The same holds true for these various messages on the web.

    Suggesting that the only benefit of advertising on the web is the immediacy and clarity of measurement is not doing the medium justice.

  3. Joe Fredericks, February 24, 2009 at 1:20 p.m.

    The underlying message of these new initiatives is archaic, and the backward thinking of certain ad agencies, publishers and, in particular, the IAB, leads the advertising industry in the wrong direction.

    Stop fighting technology and putting down your ad network and exchange partners - and for that matter, stop putting down online direct marketers. Technology is, in fact, the brand marketer's best friend.

    The Internet enables measurement and quantification of performance like no other medium. Get used to it.

  4. John Grono from GAP Research, February 24, 2009 at 8:38 p.m.

    A good question Michael. Rich-media is indeed rich in its cost. But I wonder if during your analyse you would have a benchmark on the ROI of traditional media? That is, how much does TV, magazine, radio etc drive consumers into 'the funnel' to be converted by the 'last click'. To me, this is the more pressing matter to be resolved - not which online format has the best CPM on an ROI basis. God help us if the wells that feed the media that fill the funnel ever run dry!

  5. Michael Mcmahon from ROI Factory / Quick Ops, February 25, 2009 at 4:23 p.m.

    Once upon a time, Amazon was a client of ours. As they grew larger and had more money to spend, Jeff became interested in building his brand in traditional media. We advised him to focus instead on existing customers and traditional direct marketing techniques of referral and reactivation, to "build their brand one book at a time."

    Jeff disagreed and went on to write, art direct and produce the appalling sweater men tv ads, among other things. After a few years of that nonsense, he announced that Amazon was pulling his traditional media budgets, and instead they would give free shipping to all customers who spent over $25.

    Does anyone believe that Amazon is what it is today because of the branding ads Jeff did? Or are we so used to defending fuzzy metrics and our lucrative practices that we refuse to look too deeply lest we learn things we'd rather not know?

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