In May of 2014 the IAB published a position paper on the role and evolution of our major creative specifications, VPAID for video, MRAID for mobile rich media, and SafeFrame for friendly iFrames on the web. We observed that the worlds of each of these individual standards, which were created to facilitate distinct kinds of digital ads, were fast converging. As a result, technology vendors and ad designers increasingly found themselves seeking ways to combine their capabilities.
Today, IAB has solved one aspect of this industry challenge by releasing a final version 1.0 of the Video Addendum to MRAID. This new ad specification facilitates creating mobile video interstitial ads that incorporate MRAID-style rich interactivity and also benefit from VPAID’s standardized methods for counting video plays, partial and complete views, and other core metrics.
This is an important step toward helping video ads propagate throughout the mobile internet. MRAID has become a true industry standard for mobile rich media, and now we have standardized a way to run video ads in mobile interstitial rich media placements.
This project presented a number of interesting challenges, as a “container” that runs MRAID ads (that is, the software within a mobile app) plays a somewhat different role than a video player that runs digital video ads. Simply figuring out how to start playing an ad in this hybrid scenario-how the ad should signal that it needs both MRAID and VPAID support, and how the container should respond-took significant time and effort. But we’ve devised a good and practical solution, while keeping implementation as simple as possible. I don’t have space here to acknowledge the many people from rich media companies and video companies alike who tremendously helped make this specification a reality, but they have my sincere thanks for their time and expertise (and their bosses have my thanks, too).
The next step is for vendors that offer MRAID-compliant containers – the mobile rich media community – to evaluate this specification and determine whether and when to build its capabilities into the next version of their products. I expect it will take a little time for addendum-compliant containers to become widespread, but given the importance of mobile video, I’m sure that we’ll see strong adoption. I’m happy that we’ve achieved today’s milestone, and with my fellow IAB Mobile Center and Tech Lab staff, look forward to continuing to extend MRAID’s capabilities and usefulness in the always-changing mobile world.