• by May 15, 2001

The Wireless Advertising Association has released its first set of creative standards and measurement definitions for wireless ads.

"We are very pleased at the momentum we have at the Wireless Advertising Association," said Robert O'Hare, WAA chairman and director of mobile commerce at Motorola. "Our ability to institute standards and guidelines is on pace with the rapidly evolving wireless industry."

The WAA issued its first creative standards for advertising messages sent via SMS over GSM networks. First, a "Full Message" is an ad type that consists of the full 160 characters available in an SMS. Second, "Sponsorship" is standardized as 34 characters, which are two lines of text on most phones. This format is designed for sponsoring content that occupies the rest of the message.

In addition, the WAA announced definitions for the measurement of advertising delivery and effectiveness.

"It is critical that everyone in the industry rally around a common language that describes the delivery and measurement of ads-particularly since the stakeholders in the wireless marketing arena are so diverse," said Don Albert, vice chairman of the WAA and senior vice president of sales and marketing at fusionOne, a wireless synchronization company.

The WAA's membership represents a cross-section of those stakeholders, including wireless carriers, advertisers, agencies, content publishers, ad networks, device and handset manufacturers, and technology companies.

* Campaign Pre-requisite Definitions:

* Permission Level: The level of permission a user/device has granted to a specific carrier or service or wireless content site to receive advertising messages from them, as defined by the WAA Guidelines on Privacy and Spam.

* Screen Characteristics: The pixel size and color of the device screen that can display advertising. This would include text limit for SMS messaging.

* Response Capability: The ability of the user to respond based on the feature set of the user's device. (examples: SMS with embedded 800 number, SMS 2 way, WAP).

* Potential Audience: (a) The total number of unique users/devices that is reached by any site's content (pull advertising), or (b) The number of addressable devices to which the service provider or marketer has the permission and ability to push advertising (push advertising).

* Campaign Delivery Metrics:

* Reach: The unique (unduplicated) number of users/devices to which an advertiser's message is delivered. Target reach is the number users/devices within advertiser's target audience to whom an advertiser's message is delivered.

* Frequency: The number of times each advertising message has been sent per unique user/device.

* Impression: The sending of an advertising message to a user/device as recorded by the server software (total impressions=reach x frequency)

* Response Metrics:

* Click-Through: user/device interaction with an advertisement that does not initiate a call back.

* Message Received: Confirmation forwarded back to a carrier or SMS server that states that the message was successfully transmitted to a user/device.

* Call Back (using dedicated 800 number or confirmation code): User/device calling in to a pre-defined and assigned telephone number communicated in a wireless advertisement for more information or messaging-that can be tracked via a specific response number or tracking code.

More standards and definitions will be released in the coming months, including creative standards for ads on PDAs, WAP and I Mode, SMS, pagers, and voice devices.