We have written a lot about the IAB and its practical and time-saving standards. And we can hardly say we exhausted the subject.

A couple of days ago, IAB launched a new set of best practices for social advertising.

IAB defines a social ad as “an online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content.”

In other words, social ads can use user profile data, such as name, photo, age, preferences, connections etc. in the ad unit itself. Moreover, the social advertising can use profile data for targeting ads and may enable users to interact within the ad itself or in the landing page.

Here’s a show case of how it works:

“Knowing that an individual lives in Evanston, Illinois, is a 24-year-old graduate of Northwestern University, and has explicitly expressed an interest in running allows a social site and a local running store to deliver very relevant advertising to that consumer. Secondly, if this individual has friends on the social site who share her interests or who may even have recommended or connected with the local running store, the ad experience can become even more relevant by virtue of a consumer endorsement in the ad itself. A friend’s photo and explicit endorsement or explicitly shared information about how the friend has interacted with the local store can be displayed in the ad, making the ad personally relevant to an unprecedented degree.” (source)

So marketers can use now social media to combine traditional online advertising with “word of mouse” to create the ultimate social ad experience! Wow, I hope these standards will help social advertising regain its vigour…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 8:18 am and is filed under News & Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.