instant history

MediaPost reports that a consortium of eight major advertisers have created a standard for auditing online ad clicks ... and intend to enforce it.

From the article:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau in 2004 issued ad measurement guidelines setting specific rules for when and how an ad impression is counted, as well as procedures for the auditing and certification process. Last spring, the IAB also announced guidelines for broadband video commercials, stating that a video ad should not be counted as displayed until its buffered stream has begun.

Newspapers, especially those that try to handle their own advertising, should take note, says one exec:

Kimberly-Clark's Santeler noted that smaller online publishers need to be on board too. "We can get pretty vertical with our branding, so major publishers may not be the sites we choose to use," he said.

BusinessWeek keeps bringing up MySpace and Facebook when discussing the purchase, though no social networking implementation has been (yet) announced.

Other plans are hinted at, however:

The deal is likely to help boost growth at Y2M. The company will have access to mtvU's 120 major advertisers, as well as some new content and Web functionality from MTV. "We're looking forward to supporting them with new tools and advertising opportunities, empowering them to expand their offerings and audience as well as improve their financial performance," said Stephen Friedman, general manager of mtvU.

Streaming MTV video on news sites? Can sponsored headlines be far away as markets seek to reach that vaunted 20s demographic in any way possible?

So theorizes Chris Thompson, a columnist for the East Bay Express.

He says that Google's practice of not running ads on risque pages with the word "kill" (and dozens of other unknown, proprietary blacklisted phrases) leads to stories being sanitized or outright spiked. One (anonymously cited) web publisher claims to have lost $7,000 in revenue because of a word infraction. Not quite chump change.

A simple solution is presented in the article, however:
"What we found in working with Google was that because some of our content violated its 'family-safe policy,' as a result we had to work with other partners such as Yahoo," says Kathryn Surso, Salon's vice president of business development.

Long live the free market.

Reported by Steve Safran at Lost Remote. Comes with the usual cautionary note on click fraud rising.