Quest for the Standard

Earlier this year, a joint venture, called The Pool, was led by Publicis companies Starcom MediaVest Group and VivaKi, and including Hulu, Microsoft and Yahoo, to test and establish standards for new advertising models among the ad elite.

The Pool wants to narrow the current vast selection for video to one golden standard, which they will present in February 2010. Last week, two executives, Curt Hecht, president of VivaKi Nerve Center, and Tracey Scheppach, video innovation director at Starcom USA, presented the audience at IAB’s Digital Video conference the timeline for their testing. They’ve reduced their initial like of 30 possible online video ad units to two, which they will be testing (against the pre-roll format) until October of this year.

While they didn’t go into much more detail, it’s certainly an interesting prospect – one online video format that achieves the most engagement from consumers while achieving what’s most appealing to media buyers. Could such a thing exist?

IAB has taken their own group of advisors, calling The Re-Imagining Interactive Advertising Task Force (what a name!), which includes more than 20 publishers and agencies like CBS Interactive, Digitas, Google, Razorfish and Universal McCann. For the first time, this group will help to recommend changes to IAB’s annual review of ad standards. This is part of the IAB’s ongoing push to create better guidelines for advertisers. It seems that lack of standardization in online advertising is everyone’s problem, but these efforts are a big incentive to brands who are hesitant to invest in the space.

Meanwhile, media companies are doing their best to get creative about selling video ads. NBC has started pitching variations of their usual ad units, offering a “push back” roll-over unit under the video window and longer single pre-roll ads.

Whatever the end results from these two groups are, there’s sure to be a dramatic shift for content owners. Perhaps content owners can save money by repurposing the “old standard,” pre-roll ads, into refreshed and retargeted personalized video? It’s worth testing the waters.

Tags: Creative, IAB, Publicis, Standards
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