From the Floor at Ad-Tech San Francisco

Today was a big day at Ad-Tech in San Francisco for Independent Content Creators!

The Association for Downloadable Media announced a new set of standards that are open for public comments. PLEASE GO LOOK AT THEM AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE THEM SAY SOMETHING. You have until May 16th, 2008 to speak up.

Why is this a big deal? Well if we are going to sell video ads to advertisers they are going to have to know what size to make their ads.

I was walking the trade show floor with Schlomo Robinowitz and he said it sounds really funny for a new organization to be setting standards. I told Schlomo that were just trying to establish what size the boxes are so that we can sell more boxes and so that the people making stuff to go in the boxes will know what size to make the stuff to put in the boxes.

Just like if you were buying a booth at a trade show the people selling the booths have standard 10x10 booths as well as other sizes so that exhibitors can make a booth once and ship it to different conventions around the world. Convention exhibitors don't want to make a new booth for every trade show just like advertisers don't want to make a different ad for every online video they advertise on.

Once adopted by the online video advertising industry these new standards will open up a conversation between independent content creators and advertisers. We will be able to speak the same language and learn what advertisers need from us and be able to tell them what we need as well.

Please visit the ADM's site and chime in on what you think about the new standards. They are pretty basic but seem like a great starting point.

As far as the rest of Ad-Tech goes there are several Video Advertising Networks but not as many as I thought would be here. All of them seem pretty good but there doesn't seem to be "the perfect solution" for me yet. If only I could pick and choose which features I wanted in my video advertising network and the ad server to go along with it. Oh, well maybe next year. It looks like I'll have to try out a few different things before I find what I'm looking for.