Earlier this week the “IAB”:http://www.iab.net in the US “announced guidelines for broadband video commercials”:http://www.iab.net/news/pr_2005_11_29.asp:
bq.. Today, the IAB, in conjunction with its Broadband Committee, announced the final advertising creative guidelines for Broadband Video Commercials online. These creative guidelines were set after an extensive review of industry feedback over the past few months. The IAB has developed a compliance program to assist advertisers in identifying those publishers and technology providers who are compliant with these guidelines.
The Broadband Video Commercial creative guidelines were developed to further enhance the user experience without constraining creative opportunities for marketers and will improve the efficiency and ease of planning, buying and creating online media. These guidelines will allow advertisers and their agencies the ability to develop advertising content that is accepted by many of the leading interactive publishers.
“Broadband Video Commercials” are defined to include online advertising that may appear before, during, and after a variety of content including, but not limited to, streaming video, animation, gaming, and music video content in a player environment. This definition includes Broadband Video Commercials that appear in live, archived, and downloadable streaming content.
p. Their site now contains the full “Broadband Video Commercial Guidelines”:http://www.iab.net/standards/broadband/. We will quite likely see the industry in general (not just IAB members) using this as the standard in the future, much as we’ve seen happen with their display ad and rich media ad guidelines.