The ad industry is putting up a united front when it comes to video.

Eight major industry groups—including the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), and the post-production group AICE—are creating stronger standards for delivering video ads.

Such ads have become more complicated to produce in recent years, due to the wide variety of websites and devices on which consumers view them. Producers need to account for everything from Roku to the iPad, along with various infrastructures for coding websites.

And that is where the industry coalition will come into play. The associations will create a trio of task forces to focus on different aspects of video distribution: file delivery, metadata, and audio specifications and best practices. The result of these collaborations will be an ongoing effort to standardize an increasingly important piece of the online advertising pie.

Harold S. Geller, chief growth officer of Ad-ID—a partnership between 4A’s and ANA—claimed the new collaboration was “momentous” for the industry.

“Implementing common practices between digital assets will increase efficiency, profitability, and growth within our industry,” he said in a news release.

High Standards, Good Audio

In comments to Ad Exchanger, Geller noted that the goal of the new initiative is to improve consistency so the results are of a high quality, no matter the medium.

Audio standards in particular are an issue. Although there are laws that require television ads to be delivered at the same volume as the programs they’re attached to, the same rules don’t apply to the online environments where many ads play.

Alanna Gombert, senior vice president for technology and ad operations at IAB and general manager of the group’s tech lab, says that there are other factors involved when it comes to audio.

“If someone is encoding a file and it’s going to an OTT device that supports Dolby Digital 5.1, but they assumed the file was stereo, it won’t sound that great,” Gombert told Ad Exchanger. “These are all things the groups are discussing, since it’s super critical that many practices in the traditional media side be pulled into digital.”

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