IAB Forms Wireless Advertising Task Force

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), an industry organization, this week formed a task force aimed at establishing standards and areas of opportunity for the burgeoning wireless Internet advertising business.

The IAB intends to get a variety of industry players involved to make recommendations on standards for creative for wireless platforms, and to help come up with guidelines for measuring results on wireless advertising campaigns.

It is important for the development of wireless advertising that some consensus be reached, to avoid confusion and enable agencies to develop creative that will work on more than one device and publishing platform. Such standards, though often controversial, will likely speed the growth of advertising on wireless devices.

“The availability of the Internet over wireless devices promises to add significantly to advertisers’ ability to reach their customers as never before, and it is crucial that as this medium emerges, we lead in the development of guidelines and identify the opportunities which will grow the business in an orderly and profitable manner,” said IAB chairman Rich LeFurgy.

“Wireless is the next plateau for our industry, and the participation of device manufacturers, service providers, content companies, ad agencies, resellers and networks will be important to our overall success.”

The guidelines for creative, according to the IAB, must address how ads should appear on multiple devices — cellular phones, PDAs, and pagers. Another issue is how they should be displayed on different screen sizes and on devices with differing capabilities — for color displays, sound, and graphics.

The organization says measurement guidelines must establish uniform metrics, defining click-throughs and impressions or creating an entirely new way to measure effectiveness.

The taskforce is headed by IAB board members Beth-Ann Eason of DoubleClick and Richy Glassberg of Phase2Media. The organization is trying to round up other industry representatives to serve on the committee, and is asking interested people to email wireless@iab.net.