Trade group sets standards for wireless ads

From...

By Matt Hamblen

(IDG) -- The Wireless Advertising Association (WAA) has unveiled standards for posting advertising to mobile and wireless devices.

The standards are expected to help advertisers, ad agencies and online publishers produce advertising content in somewhat uniform ways, making the production process smoother, said WAA officials in San Francisco.

Today, the production environment is complex, since there are dozens of devices to which publishers could serve ads and hundreds of companies that publish or create ads or provide wireless networks, said Tom Bair, chairman of the Ad Standards Committee.

"Standards will make it dramatically easier ... to coordinate on a wireless campaign," he said.

Analyst Alan Reiter at Wireless Internet and Mobile Computing in Chevy Chase, Md., said the standards are a "good idea, if only to put before the parties a target on the dartboard for them to throw something at."

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With common formats and sizes, ads can be interchangeable no matter who produces them or which device they appear on, Bair said.

For example, the standards say Short Messaging Service (SMS) ads should be 100 characters long, which was based on the current length employed by the Sprint Wireless SMS, Bair said. The standards also say an interstitial Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) ad should be 80 pixels by 31 pixels to run full screen on a four-line display. That WAP ad would last no longer than five seconds, and a user should have the option to skip it, according to the standards.

Reiter said five seconds "doesn't seem unduly long unless you are dialing 911 on the phone or the phone crashes because of the ad."

About 30 members of the WAA were involved with the ad standards, including carriers, device makers and advertisers, Bair said. The standards are under review for 30 days, but WAA expects industry adoption.

Bair acknowledged that the standards don't do everything, such as set standards for streaming video wireless advertising, which he said is "really not a practical mode of advertising right now" because it is so new. "These standards aren't comprehensive and will be expanded," said Bair.

Wireless advertising is boosted by some wireless carriers as a means of potentially lowering users' costs for airtime. Also, analysts have noted that some popular wireless trials have produced a favorable response by users, as long as the advertising is properly targeted.

"If wireless advertising is handled intelligently and the users benefit from it, it could become successful," Reiter said. "But users have to find some quid pro quo, such as two minutes of free airtime for accepting a 30-second ad."

Bair said his committee believes that advertising could result in richer content for wireless users when the advertising is tied to nonadvertising content. Wireless classified advertising could become as valuable to wireless users as the classified ads are to newspaper readers who are seeking jobs or trying to find a house or a car, he said.

"Last week, somebody told me he was using a laptop with a wireless card to find homes up for sale as he was driven around neighborhoods," Bair said.

Separately, the Los Angeles Times is starting to build a classified advertising service with AdaptiveInfo in Irvine, Calif., said Daniel Billsus, chief technology officer at AdaptiveInfo. One example of the pending service was described by Billsus at a recent Bot 2001 conference in Boston. The service was for a wireless user to find used cars for sale within a certain ZIP code. With proper intelligent agents built into the service, a user might find that a 1995 Mazda Protege was unavailable within the nearest ZIP codes, but the user could reset the search for the same car for other model years and possibly find something for sale, Billsus said. This would be more efficient than scouring the entire listing from a handheld device and even faster than scanning the print classifieds of many newspapers, he said.