Never a dull moment at the Internet Advertising Bureau, and 2016 is no exception. Of three key themes codified in January, better user ad experience and more precision in consumer targeting have seen healthy uptake, while the desire to add 10,000 jobs in a diversity push is understandably a longer haul.
“I’m very proud of the progress that we’ve made I terms of user experience,” IAB Board of Directors Chairperson Lauren Wiener says in an interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s annual MIXX conference in Manhattan.
She points to the IAB Tech Lab’s embrace of a whole new set of standards around its LEAN principles—Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported and Non-invasive ads. LEAN is aimed at optimizing user experience to address the industry’s ad blocking challenge. “That’s been a big milestone,” says Wiener, who is President of Buyer Platforms at Tremor Video.
More precise consumer targeting means showing people things they care about and value, according to Wiener. “What we’ve seen from a lot of the campaigns this year is there’s been a sea change in the quality of creative storytelling, as well as the sophistication of the targeting,” Wiener says.
Many publishers have embraced native ad formats and incorporating ads in a more seamless way to provide a more balanced value exchange for the consumer. “As a result, we’ve seen a big decline on the advertising side in intrusive ads. We’ve seen quite frankly a big decline in display and a big rise in ads that have sight, sound and motion,” Wiener says. “Publishers of all sizes and content types have really embraced this transformation.”
Diversity isn’t just about attracting “different socio-economic groups or skin color,” Wiener explains. “We want to also get a lot more folks who would have flocked to Wall Street or Silicon Valley to come to the advertising industry to help support our programmatic operations.”
The IAB has also dipped its toes into augmented and virtual reality as marketing tools. Wiener describes Pokémon Go as “is just the tip of the iceberg” and the gaming industry as “the petri dish to watch” for these nascent technologies.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB MIXX Conference, 2016, presented by The TradeDesk. Please find additional videos from the Conference here.
