New guidelines from the Interactive Advertising Bureau address the fragmentation in in-app advertising, with incompatible rich media ad formats in the marketplace from a variety of vendors.

The IAB has been working with the mobile industry to define a common application programming interface for mobile rich media advertisements and has just released the new guidelines. The goal is to establish a standard framework for these ads and help further growth in mobile advertising.

?For some things that are common, that a marketer is going to want to do time and again, it makes sense to have a standardized way to specify what the ad is trying to do,? said Joe Laszlo, deputy director of the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, New York.

?What MRAID does is it will make it easier for agencies to create mobile rich media ads that can run across a wide variety of publishers and applications without needing to rewrite ads for all of the different platforms,? he said.

Fragmented formats
The fragmentation in rich media mobile advertising requires marketers and agencies to rewrite the underlying code on ads several times in order to run them across different apps. These inefficiencies can delay and inhibit the monetization of content.

Rich media vendors, mobile ad vendors and publishers increasingly see the complexity of creating rich media ads as an issue.

The issue has become more important as brands? mobile advertising budgets continue to grow.

To address the fragmentation issue, IAB worked with representatives from across the mobile advertising ecosystem, including Google, Adobe, The New York Times Co. and inMobi, to come up with a way to simplify the process of creating rich media ads with the goal of increasing the likeliness that agencies will leverage mobile in their media buys.

The final version of the Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions were released yesterday by the IAB Mobile Marketer Center of Excellence.

?It was a really good cross-section of the most important players and all strongly agreed that this was an important project for insuring that the mobile ad market continues to grow robustly,? Mr. Laszlo said.

The guidelines will require rich media advertising companies to make some changes. Many have known about the guidelines for some time, with any changes expected to roll out over the next two to three months.

?Mostly the rich media ad enablers, if they want to be compliant are going to need to make some changes to their software so they speak MRAID?s language,? Mr. Laszlo said.

There could also be a learning curve on the buying side. ?There is definitely going to be a learning period when agencies learn to use MRAID,? Mr. Laszlo said.

This is the first version of MRAID and the IAB expects the guidelines will evolve over time.

?It is a really important foundation that will help with 70 to 80 percent of rich media ads but there is still more work to do,? Mr. Laszlo said. ?The IAB will build on and increase the number of cool features that MRAID supports.?

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York