• by March 15, 2001

By Ken Liebeskind

What can a single individual do to promote Internet advertising? Well, if the individual happens to be the CEO of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), here's a chance for her to do a lot.

Robin Webster, who became the CEO in late January, is at the forefront of a rapidly growing, but struggling industry that is striving to emerge from the dot-com fallout that has hindered Internet advertising.

Webster held marketing positions at Frito Lay, Nestle and Weight Watchers before getting involved with online advertising at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and EMarketworld, where she held senior executive positions.

The IAB was formed in 1996 by ESPN, CNET, AOL and other Web publishers who realized a need for an organization that could help the industry grow. The first thing it did was work with Price Waterhouse to create quarterly online ad revenue reports, which continue to be published. Also in 1996, it created the first standards for online ad sizes. Webster was at ANA at the time, and played a major role in developing them. "There was a problem of 650 banner sizes that often differed by a pixel," she says. "Advertisers came to me and said it's ridiculous because we spend our production budgets on resizing ads." The ANA, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the IAB worked together to develop eight banner sizes, which became the industry's first standards. "It was a huge accomplishment," Webster says.

The standards remained for over four years until two weeks ago, when the IAB finally created new ones. They are larger sized ads that dwarf the standard banners. "We know through research that bigger and more interactive models work better," Webster says, "but advertisers are still reticent to go to more sizes." The problem is getting sites to use the new sizes and advertisers to try them.

The IAB was criticized for waiting so long to introduce new sizes. Now Webster says it will begin reviewing the standards every six months and perhaps introduce new ones.

The IAB doesn't just introduce the standards, it tests them to see if they work. It has hired Dynamic Logic, a research firm, to complete a study. But it needs advertising examples to test. "We have to find someone who has done the executions and can test the old sizes with the new for like products," she says. She issued a call to advertising agencies to work with the IAB on the project.

After the new formats were introduced, the IAB was also criticized for only introducing larger size formats. Rich media is where it's happening, they said, but the IAB did nothing along those lines. But Webster says that is the next project the IAB is working on. "A month from now we'll have the guidelines," she says, although she was unable to say what type of guidelines they'll be. There are many rich media formats out there, so it will be interesting to see which ones the IAB standardizes.

There's no telling where Internet advertising is really go