Wireless ads get standardized

According to the Wireless Advertising Association (WAA), a brand in the hand is worth so much that standards are necessary. The WAA (www.waaglobal.org) recently adopted a comprehensive set of standards, passed through unanimous support from WAA member companies, for advertising on three platform/protocol groups: PDA, SMS and WAP.

Intended for the entire wireless advertising value chain that includes advertisers, carriers and handset manufacturers, they dictate, for example, how long a pop-up ad should stay on a cellular phone’s screen and the number of characters that an ad accompanying a short-text message should contain.

“We started to hear a call for standards from a number of companies who were reluctant to get into wireless advertising without some standards being in place,” said Tom Bair, chair of the WAA ad standards initiative.

Without standards, for example, a single campaign for one advertiser may require creating six to eight different versions of one ad. It’s also important that every consumer gets the same message, regardless of which carrier they use or what device they carry.

“The standards are important because the industry is extremely immature,” said Barry Peters, Lot21 (www.lot21.com) director of emerging media and WAA board member. “If you look at the Internet, the 468x60 banner became the de facto standard. Right now, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (www.iab.net) is redefining that and putting out new standards of what size advertisement makes an ad on the Web.”

The WAA doesn’t want to repeat the Internet’s mistakes and risk consumer backlash, Peters said. The metric used for the first four years of the Internet’s existence was click-through, and now the industry is scrambling because that metric doesn’t work anymore.

“That’s a big challenge we’re trying to overcome with wireless, because wireless is interactive and direct response to a great degree. We want the industry to realize that this is something beyond just click-through or call-through,” he said. “It also is a fairly powerful branding mechanism by putting a brand in the hand … and we just want to make sure it’s done correctly.”

With the standards, the WAA tried to provide the minimum amount of specification without inhibiting any company’s right to “build a better mouse trap” and find a business model that works for it.

“The standards are meant to help guide advertisers and make the user experience consistent,” Peters said. “If we always put an advertisement in the first 36 characters of a text ad through SMS, users will know that’s an advertisement and can act accordingly. We’re recommending that these be embraced by all people in the wireless space, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job by getting the Motorolas (www.motorola.com), Nextels (www.nextel.com), AOLs (www.aol.com) and MSNs (www.msn.com) all in the same room to agree on this.”

According to Bair, the standards aren’t comprehensive and will continuously evolve. The WAA standardized the formats it thought were most important and would be most widely used with today’s technology. He said the group may create a seal of approval or “WAA-compliant” graphic that companies can post on their sites.

A complete list of industry standards can be found at ( www.waaglobal.org/ press/standards_press.html).