• by Kate Kaye , April 29, 2004

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on Thursday unveiled recommended guidelines for pop-up and pop-under ad units in an effort to improve the efficiency of online ad creation and media buying.

According to the self-regulatory IAB guidelines, a pop-up or pop-under ad is defined as: "Any advertising experience that utilizes a web-browser initiated additional window to deliver an ad impression either directly above or below the existing browser experience." The 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. A session may be a single visit to a site or network, as determined by the publisher and ad server.

The voluntary rules also state that pop-up and pop-under ads should be clearly labeled with the "name of the Network/Advertiser--Publisher--Browser Type." The guidelines will be finalized after a two-month-long comment and review period.

"The reality is that pop-ups still mean a lot to a lot of sites with regard to ad revenue," observes Peter Green, national sales manager at weather.com. "However, a lot of companies, including ourselves, are aware that pop-ups are a form of advertising that can be very intrusive." Weather.com currently serves one pop-up per user, per visit, and requires that pop-up ads feature an exit component.

The top three pop-up advertisers during March 2004 were Yahoo!, which ran more than 177 million impressions on sites including Classmates and BlackPlanet.com; the Republican National Committee, which logged more than 90 million impressions on the Excite network, as well as on WWE Smackdown! and iWon; and American Express Co., which ran over 85 million impressions on sites including weather.com and Quicken.com, according to Nielsen//NetRatings' AdRelevance.

In crafting the guidelines, the IAB's Pop-Up Task Force took into consideration research that included an Intelliseek/PlanetFeedback Consumer Trust in Advertising Study, which found that 83 percent of participants said pop-ups are "annoying." The group also cited a Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance finding that about 6 percent of all Web ad impressions between March 2003 and February 2004 were pop-ups.

The IAB Task Force, led by Rich LeFurgy of Archer Advisors and Scot McLernon of CBS MarketWatch, includes representatives of About, Inc., CNET Networks, Forbes.com, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, ValueClick, Dow Jones & Co.'s Wall Street Journal Online, and weather.com.

"The IAB is headed in the right direction," concludes Weather.com's Green. "This is an issue everybody's trying to get their arms around."

To access the new guidelines, go to: http://www.iab.net/