The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada has released the first update to its core ad guidelines since 2012, with a host of changes to help adapt Canadian online ads to the new mobile-dominated consumer landscape.
The updated guidelines include new standard ad sizes for smartphones to help publishers better monetize mobile sites and apps, as well as guidance on transitioning design processes from Flash to the more mobile-friendly HTML5 framework. It also takes the first steps towards aspect ratio-based ad units, which will help creatives and publishers more easily accommodate the growing variety of mobile screen sizes.
The guidelines were created by a task force of 16 IAB members, including representatives from Google, IPG Mediabrands, Shaw Media, Cineplex and SapientNitro. Though the previous 2012 guidelines were created by the IAB Ad Ops Committee, composed mostly of publisher representatives, the organization felt the new guidelines should have input from a broader group of stakeholders including agencies and technology companies.
Paul Vincent, founder and president of Toronto startup Neuranet and an expert on HTML5 responsive ad design, was an influential member of the task force. He’s also working with the IAB in the U.S. to develop similar guidelines.
Vincent said a major reason the IAB launched the task force was that Canadian publishers were finding it difficult to attract advertiser spend on mobile. “The biggest issue for us was, with the increase in traffic towards smartphones and tablets, the existing standards just did not come anywhere close to what we need,” Vincent told Marketing. “A lot of the publishers are struggling to generate revenue off smartphones in particular.”
According to the IAB, Canadians spend about half their online time on mobile, but eMarketer estimates that mobile still only accounts for 23% of digital ad spend.
With the seismic shift to mobile, the IAB and other trade associations have been challenged to keep their ad standards up-to-date. But despite the difficulty, Vincent said IAB Canada is the first organization internationally to adopt mobile-forward ad guidelines that include HTML5.
“IAB Canada is actually leading the world on this,” he said. “We’re the first country to significantly focus on HTML5.”
Paving the way for non-fixed ad sizes
The new guidelines adopt several measures to make mobile ads easier to work with, more scalable, and more attractive to advertisers. To take advantage of the high-definition displays that are common on newer smartphones like the iPhone 6 Plus and LG G2, the IAB added two larger standard ad units: a 600×100 banner (corresponding to the 300×50 standard definition banner) and a 600×200 in-feed ad (corresponding to 300×100).
To make the banner sizes more standardized across publishers, so that advertisers can better scale their campaigns across apps and sites, the IAB eliminated several irregular and rarely-used ad sizes, including 216×36, 168×28, 480×80, 300×90 and 600×90.
The remaining ad sizes all conform to standard aspect ratios, which hold across both mobile and desktop devices. By creating families of ads that maintain the same aspect ratio across devices, the IAB hopes to make it easier for agencies to adapt campaigns from one set of devices to another. It will also make it much easier to create new ad sizes, to keep up with the steady march of new technology towards higher and higher resolution screens.
An image from Paul Vincent’s slide deck of mobile SD, mobile HD and desktop ads
To facilitate full-screen mobile ads, which have become a lot more popular in the last year, the IAB also included guidance on aspect ratios and screen sizes for most common devices.
Shifting to responsive design
The death of Flash is not news to the industry, but IAB Canada is one of the first organizations to encourage advertisers to make the transition to HTML5.
“Flash doesn’t work on iOS and has a significant lack of support on Android. That just results in static jpegs and animated gifs that are terrible. There’s just no way forward for the industry,” Vincent said.
“There have been some high-end ad campaigns that have been done with HTML5, but it’s usually pretty rudimentary and very expensive.”
Vincent stressed the benefits of HTML5-based ads, including smoother animation, better loading times, and the big one: more efficient cross-device workflow. Using responsive design, creatives can build a single ad implementation that can fill any similarly-dimensioned ad space, regardless of its resolution. That’s one of the big reasons for shifting to aspect-ratio based units — with HTML5, creatives can make one banner that runs on smartphone, tablet and desktop, without any extra work to adapt it.
IAB old 2012 sizes vs. benchmark screen sizes
IAB updated 2014 aspect ratio-based sizes vs. benchmark screen sizes
In addition to adopting aspect ratios, the IAB also hopes to encourage responsive ads by raising the maximum file size for ad units, to accommodate larger HTML5 files. Full-screen mobile ads, in particular, were given a special allotment of up to 300kb, since a device doesn’t need to load editorial at the same time it’s loading a full-screen ad. This will hopefully give advertisers more freedom to develop interactive, full-screen rich media ads for mobile devices.
Vincent said increasing network strength, and the development of mobile connection-based targeting, were also considerations in raising the file size cap.
Later this month, the IAB plans to host two seminars on the impact that HTML5 will have on the ad business and the tools available for creatives and developers to design HTML5 ads.
