The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which helps set uniform standards for online advertising, is adding a new format to the mix: video ads that you can skip.
In doing so, the IAB is offering support for publishers who believe consumers should be able to skip irrelevant ads shown at the beginning of a video.
The introduction comes as publishers are investing more in longer-form, original web-video content in the hope of boosting advertising spending in the medium. To help that movement, the new guidelines support what the IAB refers to as ad "pods" -- in essence, a series of video ads that can appear within a single ad break, similar to a TV commercial break.
