Dive Brief:
- Six months ago the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced its LEAN (Light, Encrypted, AdChoices-supporting, and Non-invasive) advertising principles. It has now followed up with scoring guidelines for publishers, advertisers and agencies in order to encourage adoption of the principles.
- The early stages of the roadmap involve gathering data and engaging in research in order to develop guidance for ad industry participants.
- The scoring guidelines and principles come during a time when users are adopting ad blocking technology at a greater rate and are asking for fewer ads.
Dive Insight:
“LEAN scoring will guide the digital media industry towards building better user experiences,” Alanna Gombert, deputy general manager at the IAB Tech Lab and vp of technology and ad operations for the IAB, said in a statement.
An underlying goal of getting industry players on board with LEAN principles is addressing the ad block challenge. In the months since the IAB released the principles, the debate around the topic has become more heated, and also more necessary. Users continue turning to the technology and it's clear the greater ad industry has a lot of work to do in improving the user experience.
“There is no question that people want to have unfettered access to the high-quality news, information, and entertainment they have long enjoyed for free on the open web. With the scorecard serving as a new industry standard, consumer-friendly interactive advertising will take hold, allowing the ecosystem to thrive," Gombert said.
The IAB has put into place a roadmap for the remainder of 2016 broken out into quarters. The final goal will be to present a 2017 LEAN scoring roadmap in Q4 along with LEAN scoring algorithms, and also findings and recommendations for a LEAN scorecard.
Though the process is somewhat drawn out, adding scoring to its LEAN principles indicates the IAB is taking the challenge of reforming the online ad user experience seriously. Given the trend in ad block adoption, it remains to be seen if the IAB’s process is a case of too little too late in stemming that tide.
