IAPI has supported an initiative led by Leonie Howlin in Vizeum around standardizing digital specs in the Irish market.

In the last few weeks, separate meetings have been held with creatives and media planners. An excellent turn out meant we had representation from almost all IAPI creative and media agencies across our industry. A lot of interesting insights and feedback were collected.

The feedback mainly consisted of:

The need for the standardization of larger formats that are being run on multiple sites including the billboard and the cascade.
The desire to half the names of formats standardized. For example a Half Page Unit is often called a Double MPU or a Megasky. Standardization is key so there is no confusion.
A lot of time was spent deciphering exactly what is needed from supplier specs when building formats, with the feedback mainly being that there’s not enough info in the majority of creative specs.
The need to understand what sites can take HTML 5 and those who can’t.
The desire to get testlinks for desktop and mobile formats
The desire for all specs to be housed in one central location saving time for creatives and media planners.
In the short term a quick fix would be to package specs by format and not send massive files that have numerous different formats and sites that creatives need to sort through.
The files size limit on sites for standard formats needs to be clarified.
The need to know the position of formats on the page, in particular for takeovers.
The issues surrounding adserver rich media templates. Many are out of date so this needs to be tackled.
Timing is crucial. Often clients impose tight turnarounds so an education piece needs to be done in the form of perhaps an SLA document to show how long it takes to get a something from storyboard to live on a site.
Creatives would also like more detail to be put on media plans to ensure there is no confusion when building.
Although there were representatives from almost all agencies at the seminars, we have put together some surveys to capture the feedback from those who could not attend in case anyone else has something to add.

Please enter your feedback at the bottom of the form. We’re hoping to get all publisher to supply this info so specs are standardized across the industry to make building formats for multiple sites easier for creatives and easier for media planners to plan for.

Thank you to all those who attended our sessions and for the positive response to sorting out this issue that is costing us a lot of time and energy!

Leonie

Digital Account Manager

Vizeum