The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada announced Monday that it has begun to standardize online ad sizes for Canadian sites. The "Canadian Universal Ad Package" guidelines are nearly identical
to those published by the U.S. arm of the IAB. The differences are that certain sizes of GIF, JPG, or Flash files are allowed to be larger in Canadian ads, and a new restriction is placed on the
length of animations - they can only loop three times, or be 15 seconds long, whichever is shorter. The U.S. guidelines place no restriction on looping ad animations.
"One of the things we looked
at was the level of broadband penetration in Canada. These file size limits reflect that Canada is highly broadband penetrated," said IAB Canada Executive Director Paula Gignac. IAB Canada will
release guidelines for rich media and video-streaming ads later this year. -- S.G.
