ClickZ: IAB Releases, Cloaks Rich Media Guidelines

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau has again released standard specs for rich media units, but it managed to publish them, appropriately enough, in a proprietary rich media format that many people cannot install, and even if they did, it wouldn't allow them to view the entire chart of specs. ClickZ got so frustrated with the chart, the trade magazine had one of its staff reverse engineer the information and publish it in good old HTML (shown at left). The standards seem pretty strict on things such as file sizes and ad durations. A leaderboard Flash ad, for instance, must be below 30k and last for no longer than 15 seconds.

ClickZ's story on the new specs points out that the almost useless rich media format employed is from Viewpoint, an AOL-related vendor that participated in the standards process. The IAB sports AOL as one of its biggest funders. To its credit, an IAB spokesperson told ClickZ that if the format needed changing, the organization would do so.