IABlog

Future-Focused Creative: The IAB MIXX Awards Responds

2013-05-15T21:06:19Z

The advertising ecosystem today is inventing smart, unique campaigns that use the latest interactive advances to engage consumers. The results are powerful. With audiences bombarded by marketing messages in every medium, advertisers are pushing the envelope to get attention and creating a truly dynamic marketplace as they surprise, delight, and win followers.

In response, we've added seven new categories to this year's IAB MIXX Awards to make sure the best, most forward-thinking work gets noticed. Through the global IAB MIXX Awards, the IAB recognizes the talent that crafts this innovative, leading edge and high impact creative. The new categories give the digital industry more opportunities to showcase how brands and agencies move their business - and the advertising industry - forward.

Branded Utility
A successful branded utility campaign has the power to embed the use of the brand into consumers' everyday behavior--Nike+ FuelBand, the 2013 IAB MIXX Awards Gold winner in Digital Integration--is the perfect example. David's Bridal recently got media attention for its app that lets brides make wish lists, interact with bridesmaids, keep track of their bridal purchases, plan the wedding party, show her current mood through an icon, upload images, log-in via Facebook and send invites to friends through the social network. Those newlyweds might then move on to using the Chip It! app from 2012 IAB MIXX Awards' "Best in Show" winners Sherwin Williams and McKinney that lets you match real world colors with paint colors.

Content Marketing
Content marketing is increasingly recognized as a new channel for brand marketers. At least two major agencies recently announced new units devoted to helping clients with content marketing development. American Express is well known for its "OPEN" Forum dispensing advice of all kinds to small businesses. Lincoln Motor Company's "Lincoln Now" site features content that celebrates design, technology and art, and in the process, the company's 90-year history of making cars.

Augmented Reality
Augmented reality campaigns take advantage of consumers' addictive smartphone behavior by creating often game-like apps that communicate brand messages in clever ways. How do you get an adult audience to rekindle their love of Lucky Charms cereal? This year Lucky Charms agency Saatchi and Saatchi created an augmented reality app that sent customers on a "Chase for the Charms," complete with a $10,000 "pot of gold" at the end of the rainbow.

Custom Mobile Rich Media Display AND IAB Standard Mobile Rich Media Display
With mobile advertising skyrocketing by 111% in 2012 as reported in our recent study, brands are out to take advantage of the landslide shift of eyeballs to mobile. Major publishers like USA Today, New York Times, ESPN and more are hosting rich media ads on their mobile apps, and platforms like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Pandora are drawing huge mobile audiences. Last year the IAB established its first-ever mobile ad standards -- the Mobile Rising Stars. Agencies are expressing great creative ideas through these new formats with great consumer and business effect. For example, Dunkin' Donuts and Celtra used Facebook for a mobile ad using rich media and HTML5 to let users customize their perfect drink.

Clicks-to-Bricks
Retail brand marketers are using interactive in significant ways to drive traffic to their brick and mortar stores. Macy's created an all-purpose Black Friday app last November that enabled shoppers to preview and get push notification on Black Friday specials, create lists to share with friends and family, direct shoppers toward local store specials and preview exclusive items. The app's debut coincided with Macy's holiday broadcast campaign featuring spots with Justin Bieber, Carlos Santana, Martha Stewart and Taylor Swift. The IAB MIXX Awards honor not just creativity but impact and nowhere is ROI felt more immediately than in a retail environment

What's next? We've added one final category to find out:

Can't be Contained! - Any execution so experimental and innovative that it defies categorization in the IAB MIXX Awards!
Technology is moving fast, and cutting edge agencies and brand marketers are keeping up with it. "Can't be Contained" offers agencies and brand marketers the chance to submit their campaigns using the latest most experimental, groundbreaking technology. No doubt there are even more forward thinking digitally savvy campaigns on the horizon.

Learn more about the global IAB MIXX Awards at iab.net/mixxawards.

About the Author

Peter Minnium
As the Head of Brand Initiatives at IAB, Peter Minnium leads a series of initiatives designed to address the under-representation of creative brand advertising online. He can be reached on Twitter @PeterMinnium.

Social Media: Planning for Real Time in Sports Marketing

2013-05-15T14:46:48Z

At the IAB's Social Media Agency Day last month, held in the beautiful offices of AppNexus in New York City, I had the honor of moderating the sports marketing panel. The event's title, "Social: Planning for the Real Time," was apt given that sports is a highly conducive venue for real-time marketing. That is especially the case with social media marketing, which, increasingly, requires marketers to be constantly on their toes, ready to take advantage of any important moment -- or relevant opportunity within or around a sporting event -- in which their brand could potentially benefit or add to the evolving story of that game, match or event. In short, the combination of sports, social media and real-time marketing are a potent elixir for savvy markets and brands wishing to tap into consumers' insatiable demand for smart, visually appealing content.

I led a discussion with three distinguished panelists. We discussed a number of topics related to real-time sports marketing, but first, we had to get the obvious out of the way: Oreo's now-famous Super Bowl blackout ad. While the Oreo ad featured prominently in much of our discussion about how social media and real-time marketing are changing sports marketing -- for better and worse -- the panelists quickly made it clear that the ad shouldn't live in a vacuum. The reality of real-time social media marketing in sports is that it's not just the big, epochal moments that make for great marketing opportunities for brands. It's what you do to integrate your brand within the broader context of the sporting event between the pitches, between the downs and after the whistle blows that sets the digitally savvy brands apart from those that allow themselves to be bystanders.

I asked each sports marketer to reflect on what real time marketing means to their organization, how social fits into the equation and how success is measured. Below is a synopsis of each of their thoughts on how real-time social media marketing is altering the sports marketing landscape, with some of their favorite examples.

Marla Newman | Senior Vice President of Sales | Fox Sports Digital

.@deseanjackson10 doesn't want taunting fouls to offset against illegal use of hands penalties. #ChangeTheRule twitter.com/MikePereira/st...
-- Mike Pereira (@MikePereira) February 1, 2013

Real time marketing means engaging with our fans in a way that enhances their viewing experience, their sports knowledge and/or their fandom. Social is the most effective vehicle for real time marketing -- in fact they are synonymous.

In terms of inserting ourselves within non-obvious real-time marketing situations, it's important for us to extend the relationship they have with our brand and our talent on-air and deepen that relationship. It's important for us to be relevant to their sports experience, which enables us to be considered the go-to source of info and continue to make sports fun.

What does success look like? I don't think anybody has cracked this code yet. We can only look to show increases in the number of our fans engaging -- tweet, re-tweeting, taking any form of action then we are heading in the right direction.

Jonathan Perelman | Vice President of Agency Strategy and Industry Development | BuzzFeed

Social media is all about real-time. I think real-time marketing is quite simple: it's capturing a moment in a natural and organic way.

Tricks don't work in social; the consumer can see right through it. To be good in real-time social media marketing, brands need to capture a moment and evoke emotions.

The concern is that marketers will try too hard and will want to turn every event into a real-time marketing opportunity; that simply won't work. I love a BuzzFeed example in which we worked with MLB 2K13, the video game that launched around the start of the 2013 Major League Baseball season.

Another good example with BuzzFeed is work we did with the NHL around the playoffs in 2012. Leveraging known tent-pole events and allowing great content to find its audience served both brands well.

As for a non-obvious situation, I'm impressed with the Tide newsroom. Tide quickly took advantage of a crash at the Daytona 500, where the crew used Tide to clean the crash site. Tide aggressively used a spontaneous moment and filled the social Web with organic, timely content.

Success on the social Web is about sharing. A key metric in that respect is how often a piece of content is shared/reproduced on the social Web. It's very difficult to simply make something go "viral." Creating shareable content that captures the moment and evokes emotion is what works on the social Web. These qualities are what make sports so much fun to watch and talk about.

Patrick Albano | Vice President of Sales | Mobile and Innovation, Yahoo! Sports

We have taken a few interesting approaches to real-time marketing that have helped brands scale this concept. Brands reacting quickly and pushing content or commentary out over social channels is attractive. But we find it's difficult to scale and sustain this strategy. We have developed ways to help brands understand the stories that are going to go viral before they do and have been able to attach a brand to that content as people start talking about those topics and sharing relevant content. Imagine if we could have told the Oreo team there was a blackout coming and allowed them to prep their integration ahead of time?

A good example of this was the work we did with a wireless service provider for last year's NCAA tournament. Our editors created "bundles" of content in real time based on the major sports stories in the new. We integrated the brand into the story that day, so all of the discussion and sharing that occurred around the story included the brand.

Another great example is our Smart Ads program, which a large beer brand took advantage during the 2012-13 fantasy football season. The actual ads within the game updated in real time with the names of teams and scores from the previous Sunday's fantasy match ups, sparking smack talk sponsored by the brand.

Success for these campaigns comes in the form of engagement and earned media. We see up to 20 times the engagement lifts with the real-time personalized ads. By attaching to content that's already being shared and discussed the brand "rides along" and earns media without having to have a news desk or clever social media manager. We've also seen 2-3 times the lift in purchase intent and brand favorability based on the brands being able to relate in real time.

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This is the third in the blog series that provides an overview of discussions from the April 3, 2013 "Social - Planning for Real-Time" Agency Day including ways that Travel, CPG, Sports, and Auto have planned social for real-time to make their marketing dollars work harder, and is also a part of IAB Social Media Committee member initiatives focusing on the intersection of Social with Paid, Owned, and Earned Media Best Practices. For more information, contact Susan Borst, Directory Industry Initiatives, IAB - susan@iab.net. #iabsocial #iabpoem

About the Author

Keith Trivitt

Keith Trivitt is the Director of Marketing and Communications at MediaWhiz where he focuses on strategy, brand, partnerships and the company's narrative. He is a member of the IAB Social Media Committee and can be found on Twitter at @KeithTrivitt.

Social Media: Planning for Real Time in Consumer Package Goods

2013-05-07T16:54:22Z

Recently, I had the privilege of moderating the CPG panel during the IAB Social Media Agency Day. The title of the event was a bit paradoxical; "Social: Planning for Real Time", but given that marketers are dedicating more and more of their budgets toward social media, they are increasingly leaning on their agency partners to do something that they haven't traditionally been asked to do, namely plan for the unexpected. The recent "poster child" for a brand that did this successfully is, of course, Oreos during Super Bowl XLVII (which was jokingly referred to during the event as "Lord Voldemort" i.e. the campaign which shall not be named--precisely because everyone has been talking about it.) Organized by the IAB's Social Media Committee, this event discussed real time social media planning by different verticals: CPG, Travel, Auto and Sports. "By featuring different categories, we were able to show a great range of real time social media examples", said IAB committee liaison, Susan Borst, adding, "You don't have to be a Super Bowl advertiser to have real time social media impact."

With me on the panel were three social media notables:

Emily Culp, Director, Social Strategy & Emerging Platforms, Unilever
Dina Freeman, Senior Manager., Social Programming & Blog Editor, BabyCenter (a division of Johnson & Johnson)
Greg Goodfried, President and Co-Founder, EQAL Media (a division of Everyday Health)

Our conversation ranged from the Oscars to the tragedy in Newtown and highlighted key insights that CPG/Food brands and their agencies need to keep in mind as they strive to engage with consumers in ways that are both meaningful to them--after all, they wield the power today, don't they?--and true to the brand promise.

Phil Ripperger: What does real time mean to you and how does social media fit into the equation?

Emily Culp: Humans are real time, and brands need to be more and more humanized (by the very humans who create them!). This doesn't mean jumping up in every possible moment. It means, just like a human, that brands should add value in relevant moments.

What is a relevant moment? How do you know as a human? You can feel it. Brands need to be listening, asking questions, and engaging with their consumers in a way that adds value and allows them to feel when topical content or value is right.

As marketers, we go to school to learn classical marketing (5Ps) and then spend the weekend acting as a consumer might. Those two things need to come together, with the rise of mobile. Getting out of campaign mindsets and living and breathing each day is the real value of real time.

How do we do that? It means we need a team full of smart, innovative, pioneering marketing minds and the support of legal, comms, and the executives to support something that might not feel quite as comfortable but will resonate with our consumers & sell more units.

Dina Freeman: At BabyCenter, being prepared for real time means more than pushing stuff out during big events like the Oscars or Super Bowl. Every day, moms in the BabyCenter Community are talking to other moms with similar due dates or children who are the same age, asking for advice and product recommendations. Our Talk Tracker tool can pinpoint when these conversations are happening down to the exact week of pregnancy or a child's life. This represents an enormous opportunity for brands who want to reach moms at the exact time that they are making decisions about that product or service. That's as real time as it gets.

GG: Real time is creating and distributing content that is consumed right at that moment about topics that are relevant to a specific time period. Examples - talking about the Oscars DURING the TV broadcast or covering fashion week in NY as it's happening. The content loses its relevance after a very short period of time. Social is the absolute perfect place to distribute real time content. People are checking it all times, it is interactive, it is short form, and it is highly mobile.

PR: Why is it important that we're talking about it and what are some examples of how it's being done right?

DF: When we dissect new trends until we're all sick of hearing about them, we move the industry forward. As much as people are tired of hearing about the OREO moment, it was monumental in bringing real time social to the surface. It forced brands to pay attention and create a strategy.

One important question for brands to ask is when shouldn't we be engaging in real time social? When national tragedies hit, like the Boston Marathon bombing or Newtown, it's wise for brands to immediately take the temperature of their fans and be prepared to remove all posts in all social networks if necessary. We learned this during the Newtown tragedy back in December. When the news hit, we were in shock along with the rest of the nation. While grappling with the senselessness, we forgot to pull our pre-programmed posts, including a celebrity-focused Facebook post that was not right for that moment. Our moms instantly let us know that this was not appropriate and we agreed with them apologizing for the oversight. We then decided to pull all posts for a couple of days because, frankly, nothing seemed right to us either. All of that to say, it's as important to be prepared and have a checklist for those real time moments when silence is golden.

GG: Because real time / social content is driving consumption on mobile and everyone has smart phones and are using them as content consumption devices on top of communication devices. Brands that take advantage of real world events are doing it well - obviously Oreo cookies but brands like Burberry do an amazing job covering fashion week (both their own brands and other brands) and L'Oreal does a good job having events during the Golden Globes and Grammys.

EC: Social moves units. It gives us context for consumers. It drives them to specific retail locations. And more than anything, it builds a deeper relationship with a brand they actually want to talk to.

At Unilever, we want the best idea to win and fast. So that means we can't just rely on marketing models with historic data & react solely to that. We're passionate about our consumers, bringing them closer to us and making the brand a part of their lives is far more interesting.

This is about pre-work, it's about having your entire team and your agencies working together before that real time moment (whether it's the Super Bowl or a Monday afternoon that matters in your community). Just as we used to plan ahead for crisis, we should plan ahead for positive moments where a brand can add value.

PR: Now to put my market researchers hat on and ask my favorite question about social media: How do you know if it's successful--how do you measure it?

GG: If lots of people are consuming the content. If the content is being syndicated on Twitter by both the brand's account and on tons of influencer accounts, it will be viewed by lots of people. An even better testament is the engagement. If people start sharing and commenting on the content it is even better. Measuring hard metrics like Post views on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, pins on Pinterest etc. are a good start.

EC: We played with content during the Grammys to understand what we would do during the Oscars on Dove. This is about testing and learning. What matters is that our engagement numbers on those pieces of content go up compared to a normal day.

D.F.: Measurement really depends on the platform, but overall, we measure success by the level of engagement. We look at Social Actions, which is any action taken on a post regardless of platform. Comments, likes, shares, photo views, photo submissions, pins/repins, clicks ... the list goes on and on. Our clients are also interested in Social Impressions, or the number of times a post is displayed on Facebook and Twitter.

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This is the second in the blog series that provides an overview of discussions from the April 3, 2013 "Social - Planning for Real Time" Agency Day including ways that Travel, CPG/Food, Sports, and Auto have planned social for real time to make their marketing dollars work harder, and is also a part of IAB Social Media Committee member initiatives focusing on the intersection of Social with Paid, Owned, and Earned Media Best Practices.

About the Author

Phil Ripperger

Phil Ripperger is Vice President, New Media Solutions at IRI. Phil focuses on driving partnerships with Tier 1 publishers, ad networks, and digital media research companies to create breakthrough solutions for CPG and retail companies. He is a member of the IAB Social Media Committee and on Twitter at @RipperP.

Prepare to Board the Viewability Train with IAB SafeFrame

2013-05-07T14:04:57Z

GRPs are coming at you...like a train," warned George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director at the Media Rating Council (MRC). Presenting in a webinar the IAB hosted Monday, April 15, Ivie offered some insight on the buy-side push for certified viewable impressions that will eventually play a role in the all important cross-media GRPs.

The most difficult aspect of adopting a viewable impression has been the lack of a standard way to measure viewability, especially for ads that are rendered within iframes. The IAB's recently released SafeFrame specification and open source reference implementation is the solution, but time is running out and the industry faces some challenges that must be overcome.

Here's what you need to know about viewability and SafeFrame:

The Buyer's demand for viewable impressions is old news

Companies, such as measurement verification services, have been asking the MRC to audit their methods for measuring viewability of buyers' ads on publisher placements long before viewability became a buzzword in today's media.

3MS is a cross-industry coalition committed to developing brand-building digital metrics and cross-platform measurement solutions. The first principle of the initiative is to help the industry shift from currency ‎based on "served" impressions to currency based on "viewable" impressions.

In November of last year, the MRC issued an advisory that outlines some of the limitations in measuring viewability and asked the buying and selling communities to refrain from engaging in transactions that involve viewable impressions as a currency, ideally, until the issues can be addressed.

In Q4 2013, the MRC will lift its advisory "and the floodgates will open," advised Ivie in a review of the MRC timeline for addressing viewability measurement. At that time, the marketplace will move on, with or without us.

Viewability measurement is fragmented

As already mentioned, several marketplace vendors are coming to the MRC to request audits on their methods for measuring viewability. The MRC is legally required to honor such requests. However, with no formal guidelines describing this new counting procedure, each company is validated against the MRC's own stringent methodological standards and then reviewed against the company's audited abilities.

The proliferation of methodologies for measuring viewability is actually a good thing, in that it showcases the industry's ability to innovate and adjust to the needs of the market. However, these different methodologies represent a fragmented marketplace. Fragmentation in digital advertising has always created friction and interfered with the flow of advertising budgets.

Compounding the issue is the high level of variability across vendors. In a test on 22 live campaigns involving more than 3 billion impressions, viewable rates varied from a high of more than 78% to a low of 7%. Several reasons exist for not being able to measure viewability, but the leading cause of such variable rates was the inability to measure from within cross-domain iframes.

SafeFrame is a window into viewability

A cross-domain iframe is essentially the webpage of one server inside a container on the webpage of a different server. Measuring viewability under these conditions is the technical equivalent of trying figure out where you are in the world from within a sound and lightproof box--a task that is nearly impossible without the ability to escape the box or communicate with someone outside of it.

Some methodologies can circumvent the iFrame to a limited extent, however, with regard to current accreditations on viewability conducted by the MRC, Ivie notes that "NONE of the vendors can see ALL of the inventory."

While no amount of technology or distinct methodologies will likely ever be able to measure ALL inventory, the 2012 release of IAB SafeFrame 1.0 can help companies close the gap on viewable variability.

IAB SafeFrame is a cross-domain iframe with an API that enables communication between the content in the SafeFrame and the hosting webpage. With SafeFrame in place, security is maintained while communication lifts limitations on functionality, including the ability to measure viewability on ads.

Explaining that future accreditations on viewability will be based on a standard currently in development, Ivie predicts that SafeFrame will likely play an important role in many successful accreditations.

Challenges exist

IAB SafeFrame is a long-awaited solution to addressing issues clouding viewability measurement in cross-domain iframes. Once publishers have implemented SafeFrame, they can achieve transparency while maintaining control over the iframe-contained content served to their pages. Ad servers or vendors can also measure viewability with SafeFrame but must develop functionality to take advantage of the SafeFrame API.

The IAB has identified 3 key challenges the marketplace faces as we enter a phase of SafeFrame adoption.

1. Complexity for publishers with multiple properties: For publisher companies that own multiple properties, implementing SafeFrame across all sites is a time-consuming task made more complex by the fact that each site may operate differently.

To address this challenge:

Focus on implementing SafeFrame on high-value properties first
Consider working with your sell-side ad server to implement SafeFrame to simplify implementation so that all you need is a JavaScript tag you can distribute to your sites that in turn implements the SafeFrame

2. Lack of testing tools for vendors: Buy-side vendors (viewability and rich media) won't be able to capture SafeFrame data until their SafeFrame functionality is properly implemented. Vendors need a testing tool to help them with proper implementation

To address this challenge:

IAB is developing a testing tool vendors can use to test their SafeFrame-enabled tags
Create tags that work with the SafeFrame API and test them in IAB's testing tool when it's available

3. Lack of established benchmarks: The market needs viewability benchmarks based on test data from SafeFrame enabled environments. Having just been released in February of this year, very few SafeFrame implementations exist for testing.

To address this challenge:

Publishers should implement SafeFrame as soon as possible and begin collecting data to show what they can measure with SafeFrame
Vendors should use SafeFrame tags with publishers who have implemented SafeFrame and begin collecting data that they can compare with publishers
Select publishers and vendors should consider working with 3MS and the MRC to re-run pilot tests that establishes comparative benchmarks to those gathered in the aforementioned MRC viewability tests

IAB can help

Ivie noted that the MRC can help a little, but that the IAB can help a lot and companies should lean on the IAB to move forward with SafeFrame adoption.

To move forward, the IAB is calling for participation in the following:

Publishers: Help the IAB define a "Publisher Onboarding Guide" for the industry to use as they work toward SafeFrame implementation
Vendors: Create tags that work with the SafeFrame API and test them in the IAB's testing tool when it's available
Publishers and Vendors: Contact MRC about participating in a round of viewability testing where SafeFrame is used. Particularly useful in these tests are companies that have already participated in earlier rounds of testing where SafeFrame wasn't used

There is a train coming; we can't stop it, but at least with SafeFrame you'll be able to see it.

Visit our SafeFrame page for resources, or contact adtechnology@iab.net if you're interested in helping with SafeFrame adoption in any way.

About the Author

Steve Sullivan (with contribution from Katie Stroud)

Steve Sullivan is VP of Advertising Technology at the IAB, and on Twitter at @SteveSullivan32.

10 Tweets From #IABMB That Show The Power Of Mobile

2013-04-11T18:26:10Z

A room full of top mobile thought leaders gathered at the 5th annual IAB Mobile Marketplace yesterday. The IAB Mobile Marketing of Excellence was honored to lead the full day of keynote speakers, workshops, and town hall discussions on leveraging opportunities in mobile marketing. The time to act on those opportunities is now.

Inspired by an awesome event, I put together a list of 10 tweets from the event highlighting the power of mobile. Don't hesitate to retweet them out!

Anna Bager: Mobile Ad Revenue has more than tripled and more than 50% of Americans have smartphones. #IABMB
-- iab (@iab) April 11, 2013

Thomas Fellger: There are now more mobile phones than toothbrushes. #IABMB
-- iab (@iab) April 11, 2013

Fellger: Mobile isn't trying to change behavior. It enhances normal behavior. #IABMB
-- iab (@iab) April 11, 2013

Car manufacturers don't sell cars anymore, they sell mobility. A great way to integrate mobile in their products. #IABMB
-- AmandaMDA (@AmandaMDA) April 11, 2013

Mobile first is no longer a strategy -- it's a reality. #IABMB
-- Dani Rosen (@DaniRosen) April 11, 2013

@roviohq taking over the world. Started with heavy eyebrows on a red bird ball in the App store. That's the power of "mobile first." #iabmb
-- Nelly Arnold (@NellFerragamo) April 11, 2013

You can't just say trust us, the numbers are good. #guidelines for #mobile #measurement are needed and the @iab is working on them. #IABMB
-- Quantcast (@Quantcast) April 11, 2013

Video on #mobile is consumed as both content and #ads. That's a huge opportunity. #IABMB
-- Mojiva (@Mojiva) April 11, 2013

Takeaways for brands looking to max mobile presence? Mobile's a team sport, launch & always learn- @pynhead @eweisberg @moeysantos #IABMB
-- JWT New York (@JWTNewYork) April 11, 2013

10.

Paskalis: The perfect compliment to TV watching is the mobile device. #IABMB
-- iab (@iab) April 11, 2013

About the Author

Anna Bager

Anna Bager is Vice President and General Manager of the Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence at the IAB. You can tweet her @AnnaBager.

If this is Native, Make Mine Alien: 3 Rules for Effective Native Advertising

2013-04-04T00:04:03Z

I am not a native advertising expert, but I am an ad pro--and I know bad advertising when I see it. Just because an ad is designed specially to fit on a digital content page, I am not giving it a pass on quality. The truth is that most all so-called "native advertising" is crap. To be fair, most all advertising is quality-challenged, including offline and on. This is the main problem we should all be working to address.

How? Here are my three golden rules for all advertising, native or not. Respect this holy trinity to be effective.

1. Make it Relevant. We know more about each specific page viewer and the content on that page than ever before, yet digital advertising feels even less relevant to me than traditional does. I know I will see car related ads in car magazines, but what ad content I can expect when online seems almost entirely random (I'm excluding the perversely persistent re-targeting which is rarely really relevant). While the potential for relevance is greater than ever, so too are the challenges given digital fragmentation. It is hard, but difficulty is not an acceptable excuse.

2. Make it Great. Content is still king. We forget this way too often when mesmerized by our data and technology. These things do not scale ads--great ideas do. "Great" here can mean abundant utility, entertainment, or information, among other things. This is not a judgment call--an ad earns this grade if viewers interact with it and we have the ability to precisely measure this (and it ain't via clicks).

3. Place it in the User's Activity Flow. And, the corollary, allow the same user interactions as on the content part of the page. TV and print got this right from the start with ads integrated into the viewer's activity stream. Commercial breaks and full page ads are known and accepted by consumers as part of the overall content experience. They may not be liked, but the value exchange is recognized by all. In the digital world, it was decided long ago to put the ads on the periphery of the action. Also at present, viewers have extremely limited options to interact with ads on the page. The sole choice of click-through or not is hopelessly inadequate in this regard. We need to change this to allow users to do within the ads what they have become accustomed to doing outside of them. This is beginning to change with things like the IAB Rising Stars and is a major benefit of many other native ad formats.

Good advertising has the ability to transform businesses and transfix consumers--no matter what form it takes. Let's move past debating the format and put our collective efforts on realizing the long touted, yet rarely delivered, promise of digital advertising by making better ads.

About the Author

Peter Minnium

As the Head of Brand Initiatives at IAB, Peter Minnium leads a series of initiatives designed to address the under-representation of creative brand advertising online. He can be reached on Twitter @PeterMinnium.

Members Speak Out: 4 Real-Time Social Media Lessons from #Election2012 & Madison Avenue

2013-04-03T17:10:57Z

In the past few years, the conversation around social media has expanded from engagement, to listening and now to social planning for 'real time.' As eMarketer has cited, real-time marketing "...goes far beyond simply posting a timely tweet or status update... businesses are expanding their use of social analytics to do so much more." This includes using social data for enhanced targeting and content creation. Brands are also anticipating social conversations to actively inform creative execution and media planning decisions for both digital and traditional mediums. It is clear that planning social media 'for real-time' has become an increasingly important part of the paid, owned and earned media equation.

To a packed and Twitter-trending house at the IAB Social Media Agency Day held in NYC yesterday, Peter Greenberger, Director of Political Advertising at Twitter, kicked off the three hour event with a talk on what brands and marketers can learn from the politicians during the 2012 Election. His talk is recapped below:

Politics & Madison Avenue: Lessons for brands from #Election2012

There is a long history of political advertising influencing Madison Avenue. The earliest brand television commercials borrowed from pioneering political consultants. In more recent years, McCain 2000 proved the Internet could be used to fundraise; the 2004 Howard Dean campaign introduced blogs and Meetups to mainstream America; and the 2008 Obama campaign nudged social networking forward.

In 2012, Twitter drove the narrative of the presidential campaign. It allowed millions of citizens to participate in the political conversation and enabled the campaigns to engage voters more directly than ever before. One of the more exciting discoveries from the 2012 election (kicked off with Romney's now famous "Big Bird" debate comment) is the way brand marketers have begun mimicking the real-time marketing activities developed by political advertisers. Below we'll explore how to prepare for, and execute, successful real-time campaigns - and explain how real-time marketing (RTM) came of age during the first #TwitterElection.

Prepare for real-time

Being real-time is not easy. The campaigns can provide valuable lessons to brands on how to prepare for and capitalize on real-time opportunities.

1. Listen to the community by monitoring Twitter conversations.

Before you can join or influence a conversation, you must take some time to listen. Both campaigns monitored chatter on Twitter to determine how their paid TV spots were resonating with the intended audience and also as an early warning system for potentially negative memes. The Romney campaign watched the Hilary Rosen comment on CNN about Ann Romney's work experience explode on Twitter and capitalized on the moment by having Mrs. Romney launch her own Twitter handle to join the discussion.

The Ann Romney (@anndromney) / Hilary Rosen (@hilaryr) story peaked at 10:48am ET yesterday. Updated chart: twitter.com/gov/status/190...
-- Twitter Government (@gov) April 13, 2012

2. Build your community by growing your followers in a targeted way.

The campaigns created customized handles for specific audiences and goals. For example, the Obama campaign set up different handles geared towards students (@Students4Obama), Latinos (@LatinosforObama) and voters in key states such as Ohio (@OFA_OH). The campaigns tweeted out exclusive content including behind the scenes photos, contests and offers to build a loyal following on Twitter.

We will finish what we started because of you. twitter.com/Students4Obama...
-- Students for Obama (@Students4Obama) November 7, 2012

3. Engage the community with compelling content and real-time interaction.

Twitter is an engagement platform and both campaigns created compelling content in real-time to encourage users to respond. They prepared Tweets and calls to action before convention speeches, debate nights and leading up to Election Day. They asked for feedback using planned hashtags (#dontdoublemyrates and #40dollars), encouraged Retweets to show support and jumped on trending news and current events.

Taxes will go up for 160 million Americans by the end of this month if Congress doesn't act. What does #40dollars a paycheck mean to you?
-- Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 14, 2012

4. Move the community with effective persuasion and clear calls to action.

Ultimately, you have to move votes to win an election and the campaigns used Twitter as a powerful persuasion and Get-Out-the-Vote tool. @GOP tweeted videos with their party's closing message on Election Day ("watch this before you vote!"); the Obama campaign urged voters to #StayInLine with Promoted Tweets targeted to mobile devices in key states experiencing long lines at the polls. And the Obama campaign specifically used Twitter to drive registration and early votes in key states.

Please WATCH this Video Before You Cast Your Vote: youtube.com/watch?v=pI5qjA...
-- RNC (@GOP) November 3, 2012

Nevada, pass it on: Polls close at 7pm PT. You can vote as long as you're in line before then. #StayInLine
-- Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

Colorado: Today's your last chance to vote early for President Obama. Get it done now: OFA.BO/RVEsLL
-- Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 2, 2012

Real-time marketing comes of age for brands

On February 3, more than halfway through Super Bowl XLVII the lights went out in the New Orleans Superdome. This unexpected moment was when the game began for Oreo and their now famous, "You Can Still Dunk in the Dark" real-time marketing response. Their agility was universally praised - and their Tweet received 16k+ Retweets.

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29...
-- Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Just ten days later, another brand had a moment when Republican Senator Marco Rubio paused during his rebuttal to the President's State of the Union address to take a drink from a bottle of Poland Spring water. Poland Spring did not respond in a timely manner and missed an opportunity to connect with an engaged audience.

(The Senator, meanwhile, continues to engage and is now using the incident to help one of his favorite charities.)

What does this mean for the advertising industry in general? In the span of just ten days (between the Super Bowl and Senator Rubio's rebuttal) real-time marketing moved from a brilliant tactic when done well, to a glaring mistake when missed.

The lesson from the #TwitterElection is clear: If you are not reacting in real-time (and planning for real-time) you risk being left behind.

In the upcoming weeks, this blog series will provide overviews of other discussions at the "Social - Planning for Real-Time" Agency Day including ways that Travel, HBA/CPG, Sports and Auto have planned social for real-time to make their marketing dollars work harder, and is also a part of IAB Social Media Committee member initiatives such as Paid, Owned, and Earned Media Best Practices.

About the Author

Susan Borst

Susan Borst is the Director, Industry Initiatives at the IAB focusing on Social Media, B2B and Games. She can be reached on Twitter @susanborst.

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10 Surprising Facts About Banner Ads

2013-03-29T18:39:21Z

If you believe digital display advertising is dead, you've misunderstood the Internet. It is in fact, alive and well. It has evolved and consistently grown over time.

Here are 10 facts about banner advertising that may surprise you:

1. Display/Banner ad revenues grew to $3.6 billion in HY 2012, up 11% from HY 2011. (IAB/PwC)

2. 80% of brand marketers increased their display ad budgets or kept at same level in 2012. (Digiday/Vizu)

3. Banner ad spending will rise from $8.68 billion in 2012 to $11.29 billion in 2016. (eMarketer)

4. Banner ads are 1.5x more effective in raising product awareness to consumers than direct mail. (Nielsen)

5. Nearly 6 trillion display ad impressions were delivered across the web in 2012. (comScore)

6. 75% of users remember the brand after viewing an online banner ad. (Dynamic Logic MarketNorms database /Millward Brown Digital)

7. Clicks don't matter anymore. Online advertisers are embracing a viewable impressions standard that helps brands make sure their ads are seen by publishers. (Making Measurement Make Sense).

8. The new IAB Standard Ad Portfolio is 70% new. The 468x60 display banner and 10 other units have actually been retired since 2011. (IAB)

9. The new display ad units are effective. Users are 2.5x more likely to interact with a Rising Stars display ad unit than a legacy IAB ad unit and spend 2x as much time interacting with the ad. (IAB / IPG MediaLab/Moat)

10. The Rising Stars display formats have already been adopted on 5 continents and in more than 35 countries. (IAB)

The digital world is changing, led by IAB -- in innovative brand and measurement units fit for the ecosystem we now live in: a new, cross screen, interactive display reality.

About the Author

Peter Minnium

Networks & Exchanges Committee Forms Image-Based Ad Task Force

2013-03-27T14:50:07Z

Images - ever a staple of the web and still worth a thousand words - have taken on increased significance due in large part to the explosion of cameras on mobile devices and the popularity of social imaging sites like Pinterest and Instagram. Yet, with seemingly every inch of web page real estate already monetized, it is surprising that most publishers haven't unlocked the revenue potential of images.

However, thanks to the advent of image-based advertising and the efforts of a few IAB member companies, including GumGum, Luminate, Stipple and Vibrant Media that is changing, and quickly. Growing interest in the revolutionary advertising format led these four category leaders to form an exploratory Image-Based Advertising Task Force as part of the IAB Networks & Exchanges Committee.

Image-based advertising, also known as in-image advertising, uses image recognition and contextual advertising technology to identify image content and context, thereby allowing advertisers to serve relevant ads and embedded links to more information or e-commerce opportunities directly over a related image. Early indications from advertisers are that engagement and brand metrics exceed those of standard ad formats, and publishers are happy to generate incremental revenue that coincides with a good user experience.

The primary goals of the Image-Based Advertising Task Force are to quantify the market size and potential and to educate advertisers and publishers about guidelines for using the new format. In the coming weeks, look for the group to publish an image-based advertising buyer's guide that will include definitions and distinctions between the providers. In the coming months, the task force plans to host training events and webinars to better acquaint the industry with this exciting new display advertising format. Who knows? Perhaps an IAB standard for image-based advertising isn't far behind.

About the Author

Tony Winders

Tony Winders is a member of the IAB Networks & Exchanges Committee and Senior Vice President of Marketing for GumGum, the premium in-image advertising platform for publishers and brands, where he leads the company's positioning strategy, product marketing and communications. He can be reached on Twitter @tonywinders.

The IAB Rising Stars: Study Findings and Industry Recommendations

2013-03-07T17:15:38Z

The introduction of the new IAB Rising Stars (RS) - Billboard, Filmstrip, Portrait, Pushdown, Sidekick and Slider - in 2011 ushered in a new era in standard, brand-building display units. The larger, interactive palettes are an ideal vehicle for digital brand advertising at scale.

On the occasion of their two-year anniversary, Undertone surveyed its clients - brands and agencies - as well as publisher partners on key questions reltaed to awareness, sentiment, challenges and metrics. Our goal was to both gain a better understanding as well as create some actionable next steps for the industry to drive adoption of RS.

Key findings:

RS have high awareness with agencies: Over two thirds (69%) of agency respondents were aware of RS compared with 31% on the brand side.

Agency optimism is high: And of those agencies that were familiar with RS, 73% stated that they were either somewhat or very likely to use them again in 2013.

RS drive results: only 2% of agency respondents who ran RS campaigns in 2012 plan to decrease spend on the units in 2013. And performance was the highest ranked evaluation criteria for both brands and agencies.

There are common barriers to entry: for agencies with larger budgets ($10 million and above), concerns over distribution were the key barrier to entry. For agencies with smaller budgets, cost was a factor. For publishers, site design issues and concerns over demand were key issues.

Pushdown and Billboard are the stars amongst Stars: Pushdown was far and away the most adopted format by agencies, brands and publishers in 2012. Billboard was second.

What does this mean?

While RS are off to a great start, there are two clear takeaways for all of us in the industry who believe in their ability to drive value for brands:

Focus on education: publishers, vendors and agencies should spend time educating brands on RS and their value. In addition, more work should be done to understand which units are appropriate for different campaign goals.

Eliminate the gaps: there is a catch-22 situation happening with RS on the buy- and sell-side. Larger agencies are concerned about their ability to gain distribution, while publishers are concerned about lack of demand (and thus hesitant to do the needed website development to accept RS). More prevalence in agency RFPs could give the sell-side the confidence they need.

At the 2013 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Randall Rothenberg asked all in attendance to commit to supporting digital brand advertising. IAB Rising Stars are a fantastic place to start. For the full IAB Rising Stars Study, please go to http://www.undertone.com/risingstars/.

About the Author

Eric Franchi

Eric Franchi is a Co-Founder of Undertone. He is responsible for the company's thought leadership and media relations. He can be reached on Twitter @EricFranchi.

3 Strategies to Reach Mobilecultural Users

2013-03-07T14:30:00Z

Top publishers, mobile and social media experts discuss how to reach multicultural audiences

On Thursday, February 21, 2013, the IAB in partnership with Social Media Week New York held "Mobilecultural: How to Reach the Emerging Mobile, Social and Multicultural User", a discussion about how brands, marketers and publishers can reach multicultural audiences on social and mobile platforms. The IAB AdLab was packed with more than 100 attendees from agencies, publishers, and brand marketers. Panelists included representatives from all sides of the digital ecosystem, who were able to give a broad perspective how mobile and social media are converging for African American, Hispanic, and other multicultural audiences.

However, it's not enough to just tell people where the industry is going, it's better to show them. Monica Bannan, VP of Mobile Media at Nielsen dexterously set the stage with Nielsen's newly released data that featured the latest trends and data on social and mobile media usage within the last year. Monica opened the presentation with data on how digital is becoming increasing mobile with 36 hours spent online vs. 34 hours spent on mobile devices. This data is in line with the mobile research done by the IAB Mobile Center such as Mobile's Role in a Consumer's Media Day. Monica's presentation also revealed how multicultural users are over-indexing on smartphone adoption with 74% by Asians and 68% by African American and Hispanic users. Such numbers reinforce not only the increasing growth of mobile but that multicultural usage of the mobile platform is growing at encouraging rates.

Cheryl Contee, Co-Founder of Fission Strategy, Attentive.ly, and the popular blog Jack & Jill Politics greatly directed and moderated the panel discussion with thought leaders:

Diana Valencia, SVP of Multicultural Communications, Porter Novelli
Manny Miravete, U.S. Hispanic Industry Manager, Google
Lateef Sarnor, Head of Multicultural Marketing and Strategy, AOL
Marcus Ellington, Director of Ad Sales, Interactive One
Adrian Carrasquillo, Producer and Social Media Manager, NBC News Latino

The conversation was exciting and dynamic, but if I had to pull out just three main takeaways from it they would be the following:

Marketers and brands must move toward mobile and social to engage users, particularly within multicultural audiences.

Lateef Sarnor was able to hone in on what most of the thought leaders are seeing at their companies which is that "social is part of the DNA" and with the high adoption of mobile devices by multicultural users "those realities have informed mobile strategy and everything is becoming mobile first."

Marketers, advertisers and brands creating engaging multicultural content should avoid the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all formula.

As Adrian Carrasquillo said, "multicultural consumers don't want a second rate experience just because it's niche. You have to elevate the conversation." Diana Valencia noted that when creating content for multicultural users "it's important to play into cultural cues whether it's with content, style or humor you have to differentiate that. This will enhance affinity and empathy of the consumer."

So, what is the future for publishers, marketers and brands reaching mobilecultural users? Manny Miravete didn't have his Google glasses on hand to tell us the future but did state that "what is now local engagement will become macro." It will be increasingly important for all businesses to sync their local and national efforts for both social and mobile campaigns. A second important trend for the mobile industry is as Marcus Ellington concretely states that "in the future more businesses will invest future budget in multicultural, mobile and social because they will see it works."

Behind every mouse click or swipe is an actual human.

Cheryl Contee brought it all home with a statement that many advertisers, brands and marketers can agree with which is that "it's important to remember you have the technology but be smart with how you're applying that technology to actual human beings." The IAB Mobile Marketing Center strongly supports that idea and will continue to facilitate these and other conversations to continue to move the industry in a direction of growth and understanding of technology and the human beings behind them.

To learn more about events and groups on this topic please visit iab.net/mobile.

About the Author

Yolanda Brown

Yolanda Brown works with the Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence at the IAB on their various mobile committees, events, and initiatives. She also manages IAB Mobile Center's 'Tap Into Mobile' program which helps businesses small and large optimize their sites for the mobile web. She can be reached on Twitter @YolandaMBrown.

Fixing Mobile Monetization: A Town Hall Conversation

2013-03-05T14:25:00Z

For those who have been out of the IAB news loop, last week we held our Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. It was an intense, jam-packed few days. One of the highlights for me was that I got to be a "provocateur" in a Town Hall-style break out session we held on mobile monetization, called "Are Mobile Pennies Inevitable? The Challenge of Mobile Monetization." Under the able moderation of Chris LaSala of Google and Cary Tilds of GroupM, participants jumped in to a lively series of discussions about the challenges facing mobile advertising today, and how we--the industry and the IAB--can contribute to solving them.

We started by enumerating and prioritizing the problems: according to a Kleiner Perkins study, mobile revenue is something like 75 cents per user as compared to $3.50 per user on desktop.

Most of the mobile problems we came up with are familiar ones:

· 1. Lack of knowledge about how to measure

· 2. Too much complexity (HTML5 v Flash, varied screen sizes, etc)

· 3. Creatives hate it: too small, too fragmented

· 4. Standardization is needed

· And so on....

But the biggest problem for investors and brands in mobile is that there's a lot of chaos to sort through. It's hard to figure out how to invest in mobile faster, and hard to keep on top of the landscape.

-- cary tilds (@ctilds) February 25, 2013

What is Mobile?

One challenge is that we don't even have a firm answer to "what is mobile?" And indeed, the distinction between "mobile" and "not mobile" may be fading away. Whether we separate out mobile, or how we divide up the world, depends on what we're talking about.

From a marketing strategy perspective, there's a compelling view that "mobile" shouldn't be separated out, we should think in terms of at home versus office, event, retail, and other places. The tablet on the couch, the screen in the car dashboard, the smartphone in a restaurant: it's where you are physically that defines the opportunity, not what device you happen to have. As the IAB says, mobile is really a behavior, not a device type.

Another participant advocated a hub-and-spoke framework, where mobile is not unique or disconnected from other media, but is the central device/medium for advertising, and other media (TV, outdoor, print, PC, etc) all are spokes that relate to the mobile hub.

Plumbing

While a marketing strategy perspective may be ready to move beyond the mobile/non-mobile dichotomy, a plumbing point of view still argues for looking at mobile as a distinct medium. There are unique, mobile-specific problems that need to be resolved before these integrated, cross-screen marketing plans are feasible. These relate to scale, approach, and currency, among other things. Technical solutions like HTML 5 will help with some aspects of the plumbing problem but there's still a lot to do to get mobile advertising flowing easily.

Standards

Another strong theme from the Town Hall was that while standards are starting to exist (thanks, IAB!), they are not there, not deep enough, or not clear enough yet.

One of our subgroups recommended, "standardize first, and innovation follows." Another asked if it shouldn't be the other way around. That comment sparked the great question: "Is there a necessary trade-off between awesomeness and standardization?" The broader chicken-and-egg question is important, and it shapes the way the IAB approaches timing for mobile and other standards projects. We count on members and others in the ecosystem to let us know if we're being premature or late to the game. And I do agree that we should strive for standards that permit, or even encourage, awesomeness.

Takeaways

One summary of the conversation held that mobile does not have a monetization problem, it has a measurement problem. And the measurement problem can be decomposed into two parts: a plumbing problem and a standards problem. However, we as an industry are not 100% sure on what the solution to the plumbing problem should be, and if it should cover just mobile or extend across screens/devices. And there's not complete agreement that there should be standards yet.

A pithier summary of the conversation was: "The screen size is small. That sucks. Get over it, and learn to build mobile creative that works."

In my mind, both of these conclusions imply time as part of the solution. Time is needed for brands and agencies to get their bearings where mobile is concerned, and it takes time for the media side of the industry to move from competitive land grab to cooperation. Any standards effort requires consensus around which aspects of mobile are just table stakes (where standardization helps everyone) versus things that are true competitive differentiators. Hopefully, via conversations like this and our ongoing standards, committee, research, and other efforts, the IAB's Mobile Center can accelerate that process.

About the Author

Joe Laszlo

Joe Laszlo is Senior Director of the Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence at the IAB.

The New Quality Assurance Guidelines: Time for a little help from our friends...

2013-02-22T20:00:00Z

At first, it seems counter-intuitive. For the digital interactive industry, which is dominated by the promise of free thinking and dynamic innovation, the notion of setting rules, parameters and guidelines seems almost anathema.

However, efficient marketplaces are built on transparency and information. Clear and common language enables sellers to efficiently describe advertising inventory to buyers. As such guidelines are vital to earning the trust of brands and ultimately to sustaining the growth we have enjoyed in our industry.

Of course, setting even the most basic rules around quality in digital advertising is a challenge. There are a myriad of industry stakeholders and many of the issues are complex. In short, this is exactly the sort of challenge that the Interactive Advertising Bureau was designed to tackle -- hence the Quality Assurance Guidelines emerged in 2008. However, the original Quality Assurance Guidelines (QAG) are already four years old in digital advertising years - which seems like a century on the human scale. Accordingly, last year we began the process of refreshing QAG.

As we set out to recast, update and fine-tune the parameters for digital advertising within the next iteration of the "Quality Assurance Guidelines", we are faced with the emergence of programmatic buying as well as the continued growth of new areas such as mobile and video. Additionally, we faced the issue of describing advertising inventory across multiple devices.

Not exactly for the faint of heart.

Fortunately, we were able to draw on the collective expertise of dozens of professionals from across the ecosystem - both buyers and sellers of digital advertising. It's worthwhile considering the kinds of participants who joined in developing this initiative: large publishers, large networks, trading desks, demand side platforms, supply side platforms and agencies - among others. The incredible support of these companies has resulted in a robust new set of guidelines that will be made available for public comment in the next few weeks.

The mission for the QAG incorporates the following four tenets:

1. Understand the information requirements of advertising buyers

2. Define the parameters, definitions and common language for advertising seller disclosures

3. Ensure the guidelines define and enable clear, easy-to-understand descriptions that meet the requirements of advertising buyers

4. Review compliance amongst QAG certified companies and facilitate the resolution of disputes and complaints

These guidelines are the single industry-backed initiative designed to reduce friction and foster an environment of trust in the marketplace by providing clear common language that describes characteristics of advertising inventory and transactions across the advertising value chain.

As we approach the end of the drafting phase of QAG 2.0 and look forward to the start of a public comment period, we encourage you to consider how these guidelines apply to your company. For sellers of advertising, this initiative allows you to certify your company as being compliant with this language which gives buyers of advertising confidence in your offering. If your company hasn't yet become QAG certified, the time is now to get involved in this increasingly important initiative.

As we move towards public comment, we invite you to get involved in the process and share your perspectives. Buyers of advertising are increasingly relying on the QAG guidelines and we will be where the QAG 2.0 spec is almost ready to launch, and as the Beatles' song goes, it could be an impressive and vital turning point for the digital sector, all we need is a "little help from my friends." Hoping we can count you among them.

About the Authors

This piece is bi-lined by Tim Avila, Vice President, Product Marketing, BrightRoll, Inc. and Rob Rasko, Founder and Managing Partner of The 614 Group.

We Want Your Great Debate Privacy Questions

2013-02-13T16:47:17Z

As soon as I heard about the theme of this year's IAB Leadership Meeting I immediately asked my friends at IAB to find a role for me there. I do cover big data and how marketers use it for Advertising Age, after all, so it seemed a perfect fit.

I'll admit, though, the chance of catching a couple spring training games the weekend before the conference piqued my interest just a tad, too.

Well, IAB came through with an exciting opportunity for me: channel your inner Candy Crowley and moderate the annual Great Debate. The privacy, self-regulatory and government beat has been an important one for me over the years covering digital advertising, and this year's Great Debate will help advance the discussion around privacy related topics. For years, digital marketers and privacy advocates have talked at each other, usually from opposite ends of the spectrum.

In Phoenix on February 26, they'll comingle on the same stage, and hopefully elevate the conversation to a new level. My goal as moderator is to get beyond the buzzwords and rhetoric. And -- no offense to the Candy Crowleys and Jim Lehrers of the world -- I hope I'm more successful than most presidential debate moderators in that mission.

Sure, I'll come armed with some poignant questions intended to spark a lively and educational conversation. But I need your help and involvement, too.

Here's your task: Ponder the important issues related to consumer data privacy and how marketers collect, store and use data. Think about topics like PII, anonymization, the prevalence of tracking tags, industry self-regulation, our favorite little blue icon, government intervention from legislators and the FTC, the emerging privacy services market...the list goes on and on.

Come up with the best question you can think of that will get our debate panel off their talking points and into a real discussion. Maybe it will get heated - heck, we'll be in Arizona, right? Submit your best question by tweeting it to @IAB and including the hashtag #IABALM. We'll sift through all of them and pluck out the cream of the crop, and you may get to ask the question yourself during the Great Debate.

I look forward to reading your questions and saying hello to you in Phoenix later this month!

About the Author

Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye covers the data industry for Advertising Age. Before joining Ad Age in November 2012, Kate worked as a writer and reporter covering the digital marketing industry since 2000, focusing on beats including data-driven targeting, privacy, and government regulation. Kate helped cultivate the online political campaign beat and in 2009 wrote "Campaign '08 A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about the digital media efforts of the 2008 presidential campaigns. Before joining Ad Age, Kate was managing editor of ClickZ News, where she worked for nearly 7 years.

Announcing the 2013 IAB Committee & Council Co-Chairs

2013-02-12T14:36:12Z

The efforts made by the members of IAB's committees, councils, working groups, and taskforces have resulted in the development of guidelines, standards, best practices and more, that help to solve operational inefficiencies and define the future of digital advertising. These elite groups are led by our Committee and Council Co-Chairs, who are responsible for developing agendas, setting goals, and strengthening collaborative relationships among our membership.

The IAB congratulates the 2013 Committee & Council Co-Chairs, who have demonstrated through leadership and participation their commitment to the industry's growth and success. You can also follow them on our Twitter list.

About the Author

Julie Van Ullen

Julie Van Ullen is the Vice President of Member Services at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Ms. Van Ullen oversees member acquisition, participation, and retention programs. In addition, she works with designated member leaders to develop strategic, market-marking initiatives for execution within IAB's Committees and Councils.