Riding the Backchannel to Interactivity

Interdisciplinary

They also may do themselves a service and talk to the folks at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). They know things, things service providers need to know. They know how to talk Madison Avenue.

They also know, for instance, that Internet advertising revenue truly is skyrocketing — it was $16.⁹ billion in 2006 and is estimated at $21.¹ billion for 2007. They know how to manage billing discrepancies between advertising agencies and their clients, something service providers have been trying to get right between themselves for almost 100 years. The IAB was founded in 1996 and today represents more than 375 companies engaged in the sale of interactive advertising, including a few service providers such as AT&T. It educates and provides consulting to its members and promotes the concept of interactive advertising. It also evaluates and recommends standards and practices. The IAB has produced a best practices document on interactive billing methods and solicits other research.

Jeremy Fain, senior director of industry services at the IAB, said the organization also is working on an auditing and certification initiative designed to standardize the counting of impressions, something service providers like BT are hiring people like Antony Carbonari to help them understand.

“Service providers will have to deal with all the same issues we have because they are going to be delivering ads to individual screens, just like in the Internet, we can deliver to individual screens,” Fain said.

Two of those issues are billing and reconciliation. While the IAB’s Interactive Billing Methods Best Practices document focuses primarily on decreasing operational inefficiencies regarding billing and discrepancy resolution between publishers and agencies, it could provide a lot of the groundwork for extending those best practices to service providers’ relationships with their ad partners.

Fain said he sees plenty of opportunity for service providers to insert themselves in the advertising value chain. “Agencies and advertisers are looking for more personalized and targeted data, and any way the cable companies and IPTV providers can provide that will give them a chance at incremental revenue,” he said.