Ad Compliance Efforts, Showing Success, Go Global

The Coalition for Better Ads, which has come up with a lengthy list of ad types that it says publishers should retire, is taking the effort global—thanks in no small part to Google.

A campaign to improve the quality of advertising online is going global soon.

The Coalition for Better Ads, whose members include several major advertising groups and big tech companies such as Google, introduced its Better Ads Standards initiative in 2017.  The program calls on websites to retire certain types of ads, such as pop-ups and autoplaying video ads, with the goal of discouraging wider use of ad blockers that remove all ads.

Now the coalition is expanding the effort across the globe.

“Consumers worldwide have sent a clear message to the online ad industry about the ad formats that disrupt their experience online,” said Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers, in a news release. “Successful brands will respond to consumers by taking steps to avoid these ad experiences in their marketing plans.”

Google Chrome will integrate an ad blocker based on the coalition’s standards starting in July, though it’s unclear which version of Chrome will include it.

As VentureBeat notes, Google is making the move in part because of the standards’ success when tested in the American market—despite initial concerns that the company would try this very tactic. Google said that after it started integrating the coalition’s recommendations in its guidance to publishers, roughly two-thirds of offending publishers quickly fell into compliance.

In a news release, local ad organizations based outside the U.S. and Europe expressed  interest in applying the standards to websites in their areas.

“Our association and its members have been closely following the coalition’s work in other regions as we work to improve the online advertising environment for consumers in Brazil,” said Renato Girard, director of Brazil’s chapter of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “The coalition’s research and the expansion of the Better Ads Standards will provide additional momentum to further our progress on this important work.”

The collaboration between the ad industry and Google gained momentum starting in late 2017, after the coalition successfully argued for self-regulation of intrusive advertising.

(Gal_Istvan/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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