Big Advertisers Form ‘Coalition for Better Ads’ ⇥ adweek.com

Christopher Heine, AdWeek:

The Coalition for Better Ads was announced today in Cologne, Germany, where the Dmexco conference has been taking place this week. The coalition’s founding members include Google, Facebook, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, the 4As, the Association of National Advertisers, the World Federation of Advertisers, The Washington Post, GroupM and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The consortium aims to monitor the quality of online advertising using technology currently being developed at the IAB’s Tech Lab. Digital ad campaigns will be scored on everything from creative to load time, and the coalition will come up with standards based on data gleaned from the system as well as from consumer feedback and input from marketers.

Of course, there’s nothing in these regulations that attempts to address ever-increasing data collection and user profiling from ads. In fact, if I’m reading the last sentence correctly, they’re increasing the amount of data they collect with these “better” ads.

This is all academic, frankly. After the chairman of an adtech company proposed to the IAB that member sites should disable their traffic to anyone using an ad blocker — with no success — and the IAB launched an entirely-voluntary “LEAN” ad initiative, which has seen little success, I doubt these regulations will create meaningful improvements in the quality, design, or speed of web ads. The advertising industry does not have a good track record of self-governance or improvement.