Welcome to the latest episode of The Digital Distillery Podcast, where we dive deep into the surprisingly not at all dull world of advertising standards. In this episode, we unravel the origins of advertising standards, exploring their crucial role in shaping the digital media and advertising landscape.
We go over the IAB's new ad portfolio and have a look at how the standards look today
But what happens when companies neglect to adhere to these standards? Who suffers?
And what about when it is the industry's biggest name that's accused of shirking their own standards?
Listen to find out!
References & Further Reading:
The Digital Distillery Ep on Ad Fraud
IAB - New portfolio guidelines
Blog - IAB Tech Lab's controversial definition of instream vs outstream
History of Advertising Standards
Adalytics Report
Blog - Why are IAB standards important
Blog - Instream vs Outstream Ads
Googles Response
This episode is brought to you as always by The Digital Distillery.
If you would like to get in touch with us you can head to our website or email podcast@the-digital-distillery.com
You can follow us on:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn
Written, Produced & Engineered by Phil McDowell
Executive Producer: Nadia Koski
Project Leads: Dennis Kirschner
Welcome to the latest episode of The Digital Distillery Podcast, where we dive deep into the surprisingly not at all dull world of advertising standards. In this episode, we unravel the origins of advertising standards, exploring their crucial role in shaping the digital media and advertising landscape.
We go over the IAB's new ad portfolio and have a look at how the standards look today
But what happens when companies neglect to adhere to these standards? Who suffers?
And what about when it is the industry's biggest name that's accused of shirking their own standards?
Listen to find out!
References & Further Reading:
The Digital Distillery Ep on Ad Fraud
IAB - New portfolio guidelines
Blog - IAB Tech Lab's controversial definition of instream vs outstream
History of Advertising Standards
Adalytics Report
Blog - Why are IAB standards important
Blog - Instream vs Outstream Ads
Googles Response
This episode is brought to you as always by The Digital Distillery.
If you would like to get in touch with us you can head to our website or email podcast@the-digital-distillery.com
You can follow us on:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn
Written, Produced & Engineered by Phil McDowell
Executive Producer: Nadia Koski
Project Leads: Dennis Kirschner
Hello and welcome back to The Digital Distillery Podcast where we take you to those world famous landmark… landmarks, and the digital marketing events that are popping up all over the place in 2023. So far this year we have already visited Vienna, Madrid and Paris with London, Innsbruck, Milan and Berlin yet to come.
Phew it's going to be a big September but for right now, there is a little break in the waves of wonderfully unrelenting travel and content…. Ahh
Ok that's enough serenity. Because we need to take this Daleic gift of time to catch up on some of the hot topics that have been buzzing around of late. .
Today, spurred by a relatively recent mini shock within the industry involving some if its biggest players, we are going to talk about advertising standards….now don’t everyone drop your iced latte’s in uncontrollable Beatlesqe excitement all at once. It sounds a little dry i know…
But advertising standards are hugely important to maintaining a quality, safe, and more sustainable online environment which, when done properly, everyone benefits from.
So what even are advertising standards, where did they even come from, and why do we even need them.
In the early days of advertising it was really the anything goes wild west. Not specifically the actual wild west although when I think of snake oil salesmen proclaiming the wonders of their miracle cures out the back of some decorated wagon, that is kind of the time period I go to.
Anyone could claim anything about their products with the knowledge that if you screwed people over too much or didn’t leave town quick enough, you were fair game to be invited to a brisk but brief early morning stroll in the opposite direction of your disgruntled customer.
It wasn’t until commercial TV started started broadcasting around 1955 that advertising was subject legislation, which was an easy enough implement since the landscape was relatively, government operated and controllable.
As the decades rolled on these legislations and regulations were refined and developed to suit the changing environment of broadcast and television. Then the interactive nature of the internet came along and blew open the potential for creative misuse and trickery and it was the wild west all over again.
The first clickable ad was sold in 1993 by Global Network Navigator, the world's first commercial web portal, to a silicon valley law firm. And you have to remember that this was a time when search engines didn’t even exist yet. If you wanted to explore the world wide web you would have to go down a rabbit hole of ‘website of the day’ type links. My dad says it was a lot like fishing. 10% Brain, 95% Muscle, and the rest just good luck if you wanted to catch what you were actually looking for.
An interesting little factoid here is these new banner ads also birthed the original, but short lived ad-blocker; a narrow piece of plastic you would affix to the bottom of your screen that literally blocked out those banner ads that typically appeared at the bottom of your screen
It wasn’t long before people started figuring out interesting ways to exploit this new form of advertising for their own gain which brought us to some of the colourful innovations that we covered in last season's Ad Fraud episode.
With the internet growing to be the world's primary means of advertising, from banner ads to video, it became clear that the internet also needed a body responsible for setting standards and guidelines in order to protect its users and advertisers. And today, the international bureau of advertising or IAB is such a body.
Originally the Internet Advertising Bureau, The IAB announced its original set of 8 voluntary recommended ad standards way back in 1996 in response to what they say was an industry-wide concern about the proliferation of the some 250 banner ad sizes already being used online.
The most recent IAB standards come in the form of the New Standard Ad Unit Portfolio with the subheading: Lightweight, Cross-Screen, and Flexible size ads that implement LEAN principles.
LEAN standing for Light, Encrypted, Ad Choices Support, Non-invasive/non-disruptive….
So that would be…
Lightweight, cross-screen flexible size ads that implement light encrypted ad choices support non-invasive no disruptive principles…
…not a very lean sentence, but I have a lot of love for acronyms so i’ll let it slide.
Covering the 3 main headings: Display ads, Native Ads & New Media experiences,
these New Ad Portfolio guidelines are a comprehensive recommendation of advertising experiences that better represent the diverse modern online landscape of websites, mobile apps, social media and messaging experiences and even new digital experiences like virtual and augmented reality.
All in all it emphasises a better user experience, faster load performance and non-disruptive ad content based on Respect, control and choice.
That is the respect for a consumer’s primary objective ie. consuming publisher content, the control: A consumer has over their advertising experience, and giving that consumer the choice as to what content they want to experience and for how long.
Ok so that's all about the consumer. But if i’m an advertiser, what do i care what size for example, my ad is on a website as long as it gets seen? Well consider the pixel stuffing technique from our ad-fraud episode. Like with Pixel stuffing, your ad could be shrunk down to near invisible size but the publisher you are paying can still tell you it was placed on their website. Or, like my recent experience with the Hermanns Heiliges Holzwerk truck that nearly took me off my bike the other day, in the bike lane, through a red light, and then yelled at me for getting in his way, your ad could be displayed in such a way that you actually build a negative association with your brand. I certainly won't be calling Hermann the next time I need some woodwork done.
So for advertisers, IAB states you should expect your ads to be 1) viewable, 2) displayed next to brand appropriate content and 3) seen by real people. Or in other words; viewable, brand-safe and fraud-free.
Another point of note is the recent update to the standard of what is considered to be an in-stream vs out-stream ad.
In-stream ads traditionally are typically displayed along with related content as opposed to out-stream which is just the ad itself and not matched or integrated into the content. This means that in-stream ads are far more likely to be effective and as such are generally sold at a higher price.
The definition of these ad formats has been somewhat in debate over the last few years and as recently as March 2023, the IAB renamed and refined them to mean the following:
Primary Instream Ads — Video ads that play before, during, or after a stream within a video player, with the sound on.
Accompanying Content — Similar to primary Instream ads, but the video content itself is not the primary focus of the user’s attention. Rather, it is an accompanying addition to editorial content.
No Content/Standalone ads— are what were commonly referred to as outstream ads, i.e. standalone video advertisements not tied to any specific piece of content.
And Interstitial: Video ads that are played without video content. that are the primary focus of the page and take up the majority of the viewport.
Now all this standardisation and defining of terms is clearly really important if you want to ensure you are getting as much value as possible from your advertising dollar. And typically it's safe to assume that paying a little more to advertise with bigger more successful advertisers is well worth it since they are more likely to be transparent about their standards, as they have more to lose if they were to do anything dodgy.
Google is that bigger advertiser for many and they are very clear about their advertising standards.
Google states that they aim to provide a quality user experience requiring that all ads, assets, and destinations meet high professional and editorial standards. That they only allow ads that are clear, professional in appearance, and that lead users to content that is relevant, useful, and easy to interact with.
So it was because of these rightfully upfront standards on google’s part that a stir was kicked up in recent weeks when it was claimed that, knowingly or not, they were flat out breaking them.
A report from Adalytics found a few worrying misalignments of these standards that were assumed to be vigorously upheld. One of the formats in services in question, TrueView, states that that advertisers pay for actual views of their ad rather than just impressions. This is great. And you will be familiar with these kinds of ads. These are the ones that will ask you if you would like to skip the ad after 5 secs or so. The idea being that an advertiser will only be charged for the unskipped ads, or ads that have presumably, actually been watched by a real person.
What Adalytics reported was significant quantities of TrueView’s skippable in-stream ads appear to have been cropping up in places that don’t at all align with these standards. Examples include instances where multiple videos for the same product were being autoplayed concurrently and both visible at the same time. Cleary ineffective and annoying for consumers.
Ads displayed as very small, muted by default and also autoplaying without consumer initiation. Even videos appearing on ‘made-for-advertising’ websites that were so overcrowded by other ads that the Skip button was completely or partially obscured making it difficult to spot or use.
You can see what the problem here is. If you are an advertiser and paying a premium price for your ad to be actually viewed and not just creating an intangible impression, then you sure as hell want to know that, when your ad isn’t being skipped, its because a potential customer is actually watching it. Absorbing your message, and not that it was just autoplaying in the background somewhere and wasting your money, and carbon emissions for that matter. Or worse, doing this and annoying the user while actually having a negative impact on that individual's association with your brand.
This understandably sowed a huge amount of doubt in advertisers who were paying for these services and Google’s credibility among the general public .
Google however has disregarded these claims as largely unfounded and damaging to their brand. Partially manufactured or skewed to create clicks, salacious news and intentionally hurt their company.
Google have since responded in the form of a couple of blog posts initially stating that the methodology used to collect these findings were inherently faulty and thus produced false results. That Adalytics used sampling and confirmation bias in producing the reports, asked leading questions and that independent third party reports flatout contradict these claims.
In a follow up, Google admitted that even if a small percentage of their ads are unintentionally served in undesirable locations or formats, that wouldn’t mean clients were actually charged. And that if that were the case, it would be a very small percentage and their high-quality ad servings were well above the IAB’s standards.
The truth of both sides of this issue will be continually debated over the coming months I am sure.
Regulations and guidelines will undoubtedly be shaken up once again as we try to keep up with this constant and increasingly rapid reshaping of the digital landscape. No matter what, this conversation around standards and safety is nowhere near over. And when purchasing ad space you really need to do your homework on whoever you are working with and the quality of the environments they will be likely served in.
Thank you for joining us today on The Digital Distillery podcast. If you are interested in hearing more about the digital landscape and specifically how it impacts the environment, you can head over to our show Green About Media where we have a whole season on the topic. We have a whole new approach in the works for season 2 of Green About Media that I can't wait to talk more about….but not yet…
If you want to hear from professionals in the media and advertising industry talk about leadership and their experiences you can check out executive producer Nadia Koski’s show Women Lead.
Links to those shows in the shownotes and you can of course check out all sorts of other digital media topics and event coverage in past episodes of this show.
We will be back next time with a follow up episode to our coverage of the increasingly important world of attention measurement where we hear from Marc Guldimann CEO of attention metrics company Adelaide and get his insight on the matter.
And if the silly quotes and references in this episode went clear over your head. Do yourself a favour and check out the classic Australian comedy from 1997 The Castle. It’ll go straight to the pool room and you’ll thank me for it.
That's all from me today, Thank you to the usual suspects, Nadia Koski, Dennis Kirschner and Stefanie Leonardi for making this, and all our shows a reality.
I have been your host Phil McDowell and i’ll catch you next time on The Digital Distillery Podcast.