Barely a month after issuing voluntary guidelines for new Interactive Marketing Units, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has found that an increasing number of sites and portals, including Terra
Lycos, Yahoo!, Snowball, Salon.com, and Excite, are already offering the new units to advertisers. As previously announced, NYTimes.com will start running IAB compliant units in mid-April, and
according to the site's Vice President of Advertising Sales, Jason Krebs, "We are very pleased to be offering these new, larger and more interactive ad positions on our site. We've always strived to
create more effective advertising vehicles that work for both our clients and our readers." Acceptance from the agency community is also continuing. "We're recommending the new ad units to our
clients and our media people are having no problems buying the larger sizes from publishers," noted Norm Lehoullier, Managing Director, Grey Interactive. "The IAB's new 120x240 format is already
integrated on Slate, and over the next three to four months MSN will continue to roll out additional formats throughout our network of award-winning sites," said Jed Savage, director of national sales
for MSN at Microsoft Corp. "These new larger ad units enhance the branding experience and use the MSN enriched Ad code to deliver to marketers additional ad products that engage consumers in a
uniquely interactive experience." Adoption of new ad units is not a speedy process, as sites and portals have to reconfigure their Web properties, and advertisers have to launch new campaigns, all
of which takes some time. "The fact that sites and portals are using bigger ad units should not surprise anyone, this is a trend which the IAB recognized early on and worked to support by developing
the voluntary guidelines that were issued last month," said IAB CEO Robin Webster. "To some, there is a basic misunderstanding as to the purpose of the guidelines, and the speed to adopt them. The IAB
is encouraged to see the new IMUs already being offered and expects to see usage of them grow as publishers reconfigure their sites and advertisers launch new campaigns." Recognizing that the face
of online advertising is changing, new formats and the evolution of existing formats will continue, the IAB Ad Unit Task Force will meet every six months to survey the landscape and make new
recommendations, or change existing recommendations.
