IAB releases fresh guidelines for online ads ecosystem

The organization representing the lion's share of online ads sales in the US is looking to streamline the process of getting those ads in front of you. Mad Men material it's not... or is it?

At its annual Ad Operations Summit in New York this week, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) rolled out five industry initiatives that are meant to improve efficiencies between ad sellers and the sites that present those ads -- and hey, a little sales growth stimulation wouldn't hurt either.

Growth of another kind drove the drafting of the new guidelines: Online ads sales (recession aside) have grown to the point where a system is needed to keep the ecosystem running smoothly and scaling happily -- a "War on Discrepancies," as the IAB has previously referred to their ongoing standardization efforts. To that end, the five new procedures are:

- Automation of order transfers. Currently, when an ad is ordered, often as not someone's got to manually type the info into a system somewhere, using a format that's special to wherever they work. To say the least it's a process prone to delays and errors. The new XML-based E-Business Interactive Standards will allow businesses to automate requests for proposals, the proposals themselves, and insertion orders -- standardizing what's currently a goulash of approaches.

- Digital duels derailed. More XML will be put to work in the Digital Video Ad Serving Template, which will standardize communication between servers and the video players that need to love them. Publishers will be able to turn over unsold ad inventory to networks that can try to sell it.

The other three initiatives are best-practices guides, covering workflow, load performance, and rich media ads.

Peeking into those guides gives civilians a sense of what the advertising folks are up against at work, and fans of Mad Men may smile to see that at least a few things never really change. Workflow still has to account for creative types getting their stuff done late. Advertisers still bail out on publishers unexpectedly and vice versa. And Accounts Payable can still make everybody crazy with arcane procedures for getting people paid.

So skim the new guidelines, curious Web-watcher, and ask yourself if maybe someday your grandkids will be buzzing about a show about those wild and crazy interactive-advertising folk at the turn of the century.