Tags: Last week at the Annual Leadership Meeting in Miami, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced that six new ad units (Rising Stars) joined the IAB’s Standard Ad Unit Portfolio. This is the first time new ad units have been approved by the IAB since 2003 and OpenX was delighted to announce that we are the first ad exchange (OpenX Market) to support the Rising Stars. And with OpenX Market achieving nearly 700% growth recently, we’re helping to bring sizeable scale to the buying opportunities.
To understand what these new units look like and how they behave on the web page, take a look at the video short below produced by the IAB. The new units are pretty impressive and have provoked increasing debate around how brand advertising spend can be attracted to online display. In addition to providing an enhanced experience for the consumers who view them on the sites they browse, the Rising Stars roll-out should trigger other significant improvements in the digital ad industry, namely:
- Having fewer ads which offer a greater impact on a page will help drive pricing up, making publishers more money for their online inventory.
- Additionally, having fewer available units drives increased demand as scarcity starts to become a factor. This is particularly important when – as is often true in the current environment – too much supply can depress prices.
- The high impact nature of these units will help counteract the effect of so-called ad blindness, which has been a growing concern, especially for those who fail to see the benefit of online display advertising.
- These types of impact ads put buyers back in control. The buy side needs to drive this process. If they demand it, and do so across the industry, this will happen faster than one would think.
So while there is a significant amount of opportunity for both advertisers and publishers with these new ad units, it’s the publishers who need to start implementing and realizing their potential. Even if it’s just 1% or 5% of your inventory that transfers to these new formats, it will help start to propel the industry forward and attract advertisers who are searching for higher impact advertising methods. OpenX is already beginning to work with publishers who are making this transition, and by powering these units through our ad server and exchange (some of which are seeing higher overall CPM gains of 300-400% compared with traditional units) we plan to help these new units rapidly gain traction across the web.
Read more about the IAB’s Rising Stars here and check out how OpenX Market can help you buy and sell Rising Star units today.
