Advertisement Unit Standards
Comment Page
The purpose of the Advertisement Unit Standards is to provide baseline recommendations for advertisement units in order to better facilitate advertising transactions relating to downloadable media.
Draft posted for discussion April 16, 2008. PDF Download
Please help enhance and refine the Advertisement Unit Standards with your feedback and contributions here. The open comment period will conclude May 16, 2008.
Should in-show and on-site contests and giveaways of sponsor products and services have a place in this document? It’s used as a method of advertising, but is almost always coupled with one of the other advertising methods already mentioned.
And it needs to be said: nice job with this. Thanks for putting it together. Great to finally see all of this in one place.
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Thanks for your comment, Brian. We are all very proud of the work that went into the document. I think it was the feeling that our task was to define the basic units and establish the most common formats that would be available to buyers. As you said, contests and giveaways are not as easily defineable as the basic units, shapes, sizes, and bitrates of prepared advertising, and also they are almost always done in conjunction with or to support some main advert.
We felt that there are many different forms of advertising that have been and will be used in podcasts, and that these units will define for buyers what the basic forms used by producers are, and that any of those other forms will be discussed and negotiated once the contact is established.
The advertising standards document is a great start! What you’ve created is a description of current practices with definitions of terms and concepts. This is useful for our community-cum-industry as we can now start speaking a common language with potential sponsors and each other.
I would like to see this document evolve to include suggestions for best practices and real-world application of the definitions. We should include survey data as it becomes available–from surveys conducted by ADM and outside sources. For example, some statistics on which methods of advertisement are most effective would allow me to match the format of the show to the type of advertisement required. And vice versa.
I’d like to be able to cogently tell a sponsor that CPM is bunk and back it up with information showing how the model doesn’t apply to podcasting, then craft an appropriate advertising plan that would fit the content most appropriately.
One key omission I noticed is a definition and discussion of dynamic ad insertion, a la Gigavox Audio nee Podango. The ability to edit the ads placed in archives creates a different value proposition for potential sponsors and gives content creators greater flexibility to monetize their existing intellectual property. While it is a complicated matter and difficult to predict future download performance, I think it’s critical that we get our collective heads around how to discuss the issue.
Also, I have two addenda for the section on Collaterals:
-RSS feed ad placement
-downloadable PDFs in iTunes feed
These two touch-points are important real estate that the independent content creator can leverage, and should be included in the document.
Thanks for putting up this document. I think it is a great start!
I am just wondering weather the frequency aspect needs more elaboration.
Basically there is two ways you can handle ad placement:
You can dynamically insert an ad (much like it is handled on a web page or on TV) or rather
fix an ad with a particular episode (much like a print magazine).
I have to explain this to clients quite often (but maybe this is just because we are not able to handle the “dynamically” part at shralp!)