IAB brings scale to Mobile: Guidelines for Creating In-App Ads.

The IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence 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.

“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.”

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 mo****@*ab.net

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: http://www.iab.net/mraid>