Editor’s note: Nick Gonzalez is a Director of Marketing at SocialMedia.com, which makes “People Powered Ad” products.
Before the advent of ad standards from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the online advertising world was fragmented between any number of display formats. When the IAB launched IAB standards in 1996, an agency could buy media across numerous properties without adjusting the creative.
Buying online media became more efficient. Importantly, it freed up advertisers to focus around the message and not the format of the advertisement.
Today, the IAB has once again stepped in to help bring clear standards to online advertising with a new set of best practices for social media advertising. It’s a welcome change because advertising has been far behind the consumer space with respect to implementing the kinds of social functionality that has made social media properties like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook so popular.
As part of a company that makes social ads, I’m excited that the IAB has released a new set of social advertising best practices to help bring consistency to the marketplace, similar to the way IAB standards brought efficiency to online advertising back in the 90’s.
The best practices, which were announced at a conference today, include definitions of social ad elements, examples of social ads, recommendations for consumer opt-in, and guidelines for privacy standards. The IAB defines a social ad as:
An online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content.
The ingredients of a social ad can include profile data, social targeting (by encouraging people to pass ads along to their friends), and social interactions within the ad itself, such as sharing or commenting. The IAB’s guidelines are clear that consumers should have control over what data is shared with their friends, in what context, and that social ads should be explicitly opt-in, with the option to opt out at any time:
Since it is essential for social ads to be trusted in order to achieve broad adoption, it is important for consumers to have visibility and control of what can be shared with their social connections
The standards were developed as part of a 151-company committee with 218 members (yup, that was fun) including MySpace, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, SocialMedia.com, CBS, Accenture, PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLC, Condé Nast Digital, IDG Entertainment, and Nielsen Online. You can see one of the many example ads above, and the entire document embedded below.
Certainly a needed introduction of policies given the importance of social media platforms such as the obvious Facebook and Twitter. Though, the landscape is not completely defined yet so my feeling is that these newly introduced policies willl give way to more.
I agree with Dan Bishop – the way people interact with the social aspect of the web will continue to evolve. The new policies are a good start, but to be effective, they will need to keep up with the continuous change in this environment. Policies will need to be reviewed and updated more frequently to remain relevant.
Though the “standards” set forth in this document are a good start, I agree with Wendy and Dan… The document was pretty much history before the ink even dried!
This space will continue to evolve at a rapid pace…
If you are new to twitter, you might want to check out our Twitter Guide.
http://twitter....afficvault.com/
Ads like these are not even in infant stage. More like preemie stage, so things will evolve fast and furious from here. Glad to see they are kicking in with standards so quickly though. It’s a good sign.
I miss Nick.
I miss the green hue my comments used to have.
Yes! Standards for another form of advertising that won’t work.
The greatest benefit of Facebook is that it has many groups on the site that you can join. So if you are interested in Chicago Cubs you can research Chicago Cubs in the groups section and you will be able to find friends on there that like the Cubs. This is just one example, I know that you can join groups of your favorite football team, television show, or whatever you want for the most part! If you can’t find a group for your interest, you can simply create one!
James
http://EmailCharger.com
Interesting!
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