Microsoft Joins Coalition For Better Ads

Microsoft has joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry association aimed at improving online advertising and marketing. The move is intended to ease consumer frustration.

"At Microsoft, we believe in supporting and collaborating with the online advertising industry to develop standards that make the digital ecosystem function better for consumers, marketers and publishers," Rik van der Kooi, corporate vice president at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

The coalition was formed September 2017 to address the reasons that consumers are increasingly block ads.

Earlier in September, Axel Springer, Publicis Groupe, and Criteo joined as the newest members of the coalition.

Group members consist of a long list of associations and companies from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A's) to Google, Facebook, and Procter & Gamble that believe in relinquishing some of the least liked ads to have more consumers not block add.

The coalition has been working on standards. In March 2017, the coalition released its initial set of Better Ads Standards based on research of more than 25,000 consumers in North American and Europe. The group rated 104 ad experiences for the desktop and the mobile web in an effort to further create better standards.

Companies have already begun to take action. Google, for example, will begin filtering ads in its Chrome browser next year.

In early June, Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior vice president of ads and commerce at Google, wrote in a blog post that "it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web — like the kind that blare music unexpectedly or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page."

He called these ads "frustrating experiences" that can lead some people to block all ads.

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