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IAB Brings Scale To Mobile: Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence Issues Guidelines for Creating In-App Ads

Public Comment Period Opens for ‘Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions’—MRAID—Which Standardizes Communication Between Ads and Apps To Increase Efficiency

NEW YORK, NY (September 7, 2011) — The IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence today released “Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions,” or MRAID for public comment. This initiative defines a common API (Application Programming Interface) for mobile rich media advertisements, establishing a framework of principles and guidelines to help the mobile marketplace reach new levels of consistency, efficiency and effectiveness.

The growth, versatility and potential of in-application advertising have drawn strong interest from agencies, publishers, vendors and ad designers. However, accompanying this industry enthusiasm has been a surge of disparate APIs from numerous rich media vendors working with publishers to enable these dynamic ads. Multiple, incompatible APIs force advertisers to re-write the programming behind their ad creative several times for a single campaign, creating complexity and adversely impacting their resources.

“Standardizing the development of mobile rich media creative will be a strong benefit for both the mobile and the ad industry overall,” said Anna Bager, Vice President & General Manager of the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. “MRAID provides creative developers with opportunities to achieve reach and scale efficiently.”

“As the premier digital media company, Yahoo! works with many different advertisers and rich media vendors,” said Alex Linde, Director, Mobile & Tablet Advertising, Yahoo! and IAB MRAID working group member. “We know first hand how challenging it would be to bring scale to mobile advertising without a standard for in-application mobile rich media ad serving and a single set of industry-accepted guidelines for agencies and designers. We believe that MRAID is essential to sustain momentum in this rapidly growing industry.”

Under the IAB’s draft MRAID guidelines, if a mobile app is “MRAID compliant,” it will read, understand and correctly display ads developed using the MRAID instruction specification. At the same time, MRAID-compliant mobile rich media ads will operate within MRAID compliant applications from any publisher—allowing agencies to quickly and easily run rich, interactive mobile creative across apps from various publishers.

The public comment period for the IAB’s release of MRAID will run through September 30, 2011. Once the public comment period closes, the MRAID working group will meet to evaluate comments received, make any needed changes to the draft MRAID spec, and release final version of MRAID 1.0. Comments are being accepted by email at [email protected].

For a copy of the public comment version of MRAID 1.0 and more information about MRAID, the working group and its members, please visit: iab.com/guidelines/mobile-rich-media-ad-interface-definitions-mraid/.

About the IAB
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit iab.com.

IAB Media Contact
Laura Goldberg
347.683.1859
[email protected]