“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Diaz Nesamoney, CEO at Jivox and co-chair of the IAB Tech Lab Dynamic Content Ad Standard Working Group.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) this week introduced the industry’s first standard for dynamic digital advertising.
The IAB Dynamic Content Ad Standard provides a detailed schema for how constituents across the digital ad supply chain should define an ad’s creative components and asset variations, which are needed to build and serve real-time dynamic content.
Such standards are important because they remove communication barriers between layers of software. In this case, the standards will make it easier for creative-authoring tools, data-driven personalization platforms, ad servers, demand-side platforms, content management systems and measurement tools to cooperate and deliver and measure creative that is uniquely targeted to individuals.
Without standards like this, there is no hope of personalized digital advertising achieving any kind of scale across any part of the digital ad ecosystem.
Hello, Metadata
The standard will drive an explosion in the use of metadata for ad creation and delivery.
In the grand scheme of personalized digital advertising and marketing, metadata is the unsung hero, the secret sauce. Metadata is how you automate and scale data-driven inputs and outputs, and ad tech has used precious little of it until now.
Most of the standards the industry depends upon today are actually more like design specifications – good, solid, detailed specs that have played a formative role in the industry at large, but specs nonetheless. This standard is different. It’s a schema, which means it can be copied, extended, verified and automated. It essentially commits the industry to make metadata a fundamental building block for its supply chain.
Goodbye, Garden Walls
The standards will pry open the doors of walled gardens, making social media and omnichannel marketing an imminent reality.
Google, Facebook and Verizon are having all the fun right now, as millennials in particular spend an enormous amount of time on their mobile devices within these walled gardens. We can talk all we want about the potential of digital advertising to reach digital natives, but until ads can be personalized, served and optimized within and outside these gardens simultaneously, the touting of engagement metrics will be largely bluster.
The IAB’s new standard gets us on our way toward breaking down the barriers to both in-app and mobile content delivery. We now have a way to translate from one proprietary platform to another using an open standard. We may now see the equivalent of “creative exchanges,” which, much like media exchanges, act as translators between proprietary ad formats.
Future-Proof Creativity
As it evolves, the standard will future-proof the next wave of creativity, from artificial intelligence and IoT applications to augmented and virtual reality.
This standard will enable an entirely new level of extensibility – in the form of standards. In other words, the more systems are run on metadata, the easier it is to integrate the technology into the broader marketing cloud and connect up with complementary products.
Today, APIs offer a way into Facebook, Google and Snapchat. But without a common language to describe ads, these APIs will present even more complexity to an already complex ecosystem.
Who knows what the favorite destinations will be tomorrow? What’s abundantly clear is that the only way to prepare for this unknown future is to implement standards to ensure a common language with which to describe ads, regardless of where they are going to be served.
The digital ecosystem stands to benefit from the standards. Consumers will finally see more personally relevant and timely ads integrated into their digital experience. Marketers, brands and agencies will increase the effectiveness of their campaigns due to increased relevance and timeliness of their messaging, driving more business.
Publishers may see fewer users turning on ad blockers, which many times are activated to avoid irrelevant ads. And ad tech platforms will benefit by not having to build proprietary vendor integrations to suit the unique requirements of each campaign, thus allowing them to focus on building more useful innovations into their technology.
With the IAB’s standard providing the foundation, the industry is poised to take a massive leap forward toward making truly dynamic digital advertising – finally – a mainstream reality.
The standard is open to public comment through Nov. 26
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