Related: The All-Too-Slow Move to Adopt Ad Identifiers
A joint partnership from the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Ad-ID was born with the idea of making the advertising supply chain more efficient. Ad-ID’s standard allows for the identification of ad assets across every media platform.
Harold Geller, chief growth officer for Ad-ID, chatted with Next TV about why some companies are still on the sidelines when it comes to Ad-ID, and the advantages of adopting the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) latest version of the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) system, VAST 4.0.
Media companies such as CBS Interactive and Viacom have touted the benefits of VAST 4.0 and Ad-ID. What have you heard from them and other companies about the advantages of these solutions?
CBS Interactive has been our poster child for not only using Ad-ID but helping us to promote to individual advertisers on why they should be using Ad-ID. We’ve done some analysis with CBS Interactive and have found some advertisers who are working with them using Ad-ID, and we’re in the midst of actively pursuing them, and extolling the virtues of Ad-ID, based on actual use cases. CBS has been a terrific partner, talking the talk and walking the walk, and I’m sure other media publishers will follow suit.
Why do you believe some advertisers are holding off on this? Are they not seeing the benefits, are they in a wait-and-see mode?
I don’t begrudge them. Any time the only person extolling the virtues of a product is the guy selling it to you, there are people who are suspect. I think now that we start to move from a stage of just saying Ad-ID is important, we’re looking at initiatives that say Ad-ID is a critical ingredient of the solution. That’s what’s going to move the people who aren’t on board today.
It’s been six months since VAST 4.0 debuted. What’s the response thus far, and are there any additions that need to be included with a 5.0, or is it working as smoothly as expected?
Before talking about improving capabilities, we need universal adoption of VAST 4.0. It’s a tremendous move forward for the industry, and the first time that there’s really consideration of cross-platform use of content. Universal adoption of VAST 4.0 needs to happen before we consider additional functionality.
