Peter Naylor officially kicked off his tenure as chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau late last month with a call for better metrics to demonstrate the value of digital advertising.
Naylor, exec VP-digital media sales at NBCUniversal, said in his opening address at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., that the digital advertising industry needs to combat what he termed “complexity creep.”
“Our products are complicated and our processes are complex,” he said. “The higher the complexity, the lower the confidence marketers have investing in digital media.”
The IAB is pushing for the creation and adoption of better metrics through its Making Measurement Make Sense initiative in partnership with the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers.
The theme of the fifth IAB Annual Leadership Meeting was “Beyond time and space,” and Naylor noted how technology and the rise of social media have enabled marketers and media to move beyond the traditional approach to buying advertising.
“All media and advertising has to move beyond time and space or risk being left behind,” Naylor said. NBCUniversal has done this, he said, by embracing the concept of “social TV” in a multiscreen world. “Social TV takes the best of television and marries it to the best of social media,” he said.
Naylor, who served as IAB vice chairman during the past year, succeeded Bob Carrigan, CEO of IDG Communications, as the group's chairman.
Carrigan said in an interview that he was proud of the IAB's adding 52 companies to its membership roll during his tenure. “But more important,” he said, “I was able to boost the b2b involvement in all of the committees and councils.”
The IAB used the annual meeting as the forum to announce the revision of its revised Standard Ad Unit Portfolio. The IAB created the portfolio in 1996 and gave it its last major update in 2003.
The newest revision was two years in the making, as the IAB enlisted the help of agencies and publishers to develop larger, more scalable digital ad formats.
“Consumers have fallen prey to what is called "banner blindness,' ” said Randall Rothenberg, IAB president-CEO. The six new units that have been added to the portfolio will enable marketers to tell “bigger, bolder brand stories,” he said.
Research on the six new units, collectively dubbed the “Rising Stars,” found that users were 2½ times more likely to interact with one of them than with standard digital ad units such as the leaderboard and medium rectangle. The study was based on an analysis of ads for the AT&T, Jeep and Westin Hotels & Resorts brands.
Specifications for the formats can be found at www.iab.net/displayguidelines.
The IAB also announced the selection of five mobile ad concepts to test for possible inclusion in the Standard Ad Unit Portfolio. They were chosen from a pool of more than 60 entries submitted by more than three dozen companies.
Additional information about the five proposed formats—filmstrip, slider, adhesion banner, full page and push—can be found at www.iab.net/risingstarsmobile.
