Back in February I organised two meetings in IAPI around the issue of digital specs.
You can download the original presentation here
I got plenty of feedback from the 40 people who attended the meetings.
The status of the initiative at the moment is that it has been received very positively. We have met with all the large players in the market individually and we have had a fantastic response from them and they are all on board with sorting this issue. Like ourselves, they are tired of dealing with this issue also.
For standard formats we have come to the consensus that all suppliers will abide by the IAB specs (will allow us to align globally with other markets). Click here for details.
For the additional info we spoke about in our sessions such as safe areas on skins, direction of expandable formats, new bespoke formats etc will be supplied via a template the suppliers will be able to update on their side and will feed into a new industry specs website.
This website will house all information needed for planners and creatives and will hopefully put a stop to having to email suppliers constantly with questions such as if ‘I do a billboard, is it likely the MPU will move below the fold’ or ‘Can this site take HTML5?’ etc. We are hoping the site will make all our lives easier! We would also like to include a forum on the site that allows members to trouble shoot and give feedback on technical aspects of builds that often hinge on technical bugs that quick work arounds can fix.
As an industry we need to stop wasting time individually trying to solve these trivial technical problems when we could be spending more time creating and delivering bigger and better concepts and campaigns to our clients, not spending our days trying to figure out why we keep getting QA rejection emails from Double Click!
These are the suppliers who I have met so far who are happy to comply with IAB specs and to also provide additional info needed:
RTÉ
Electric Media (Irishtimes, Entertainment.ie, Breaking News, BBC etc)
Independent Media
Yahoo!
Google
Microsoft
Smaller suppliers are being contacted currently by email but we are hopeful they will all be on board.
Next steps would be to get a smaller working group on board to provide some initial ideas and feedback on design and layout of the site (ideas for the name of the site are also welcomed!). If you are interested in being involved in this smaller working group please email leonie.howlin@radical.ie. The site will then go into production here in Radical and we will then be able to determine exact timelines for when we can go live based on the scope of the project.
Many thanks,
Leonie Howlin, Client Manager, Radical
