The Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising initiative has unveiled rich media advertising specifications and code that can be used by any publisher looking to serve rich ads across all mobile platforms and devices. The initiative, which was launched by founding members The Weather Channel (TWC), Crisp Wireless and TringApps, is trying to simplify the currently complex process of deploying large scale mobile advertising campaigns by encouraging the industry to adopt an open standard.
"The current model for serving ads into mobile apps is broken," noted Cameron Clayton, senior vice president of mobile and digital applications for TWC in a statement. "Publishers and app developers need to work with numerous vendors and SDKs [software development kits] to run campaigns across multiple platforms and devices, which great limits the ability to plan large-scale mobile rich media buys. The mission of ORMMA is to simplify the serving of rich media ads into mobile apps by creating an open standard and industry best practices that gain contribution from-and are adopted by-leading publishers, developers and vendors."
ORMMA initiative, which is being adopted by PointRoll, Jumptap and others, proposes a vendor-agnostic approach to solving the fragmentation that exists in the mobile advertising industry and extending desktop ad serving technologies to mobile apps. The ORMMA specifications utilize existing HTML5 standards, enabling ad units to be created and delivered in a simplified manner so they are compatible with all devices and platforms.
"ORMMA is an elegant, open source based approach that bridges the gap between desktop and mobile and simplifies the process of serving rich media across multiple platforms and devices," Boris Fridman, CEO of Crisp Wireless added in a statement.
The initiative is under review by the Mobile Marketing Association, which is expected to release a whitepaper and evaluation of ORMMA within the next three months.
