ORMMA gains support in Asia

While ORMMA has been around for a year, primarily in the United States, this week ORMMA finally broadens its coverage to Asia after MobDis announces its support of ORMMA. MobDis, a product of venture capital funded Singapore based start-up 2359 Media Pte Ltd, is leading ORMMA support in Asia and also pledging to educate the Asian community about ORMMA. Mobile Marketing Associate APAC is working with MobDis in this industry adoption.

The Co-founder of MobDis, Zhou Wenhan, commented that, "We (MobDis) wanted to adopt ORMMA as it is currently the most popular standard in the industry. The standard is supported by respected organizations like Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is using ORMMA as the starting point of its own MRAID standard. We are glad that we have achieved ORMMA compliance and will look forward to support MRAID as well."

With that, MobDis have released an infographic to explain and educate on the importance on mobile rich media advertising standard. The infographic shows the what, why, when, who and how of ORMMA.

Here is a link to the full press release

IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence asks for comments on MRAID

In April of this year, several ORMMA members started work with an IAB Working group to define a common API for mobile rich media advertisements based on the ORMMA project, establishing a framework of principles and guidelines to help the mobile marketplace reach new levels of consistency, efficiency and effectiveness.

 

The ORMMA thought leaders from The Weather Channel, Pointroll, Crisp Media, AdMarvel, Goldspot Media, Yahoo and Google were closely involved. There were also 20 other companies involved, such as 24/7, Accuweather, Mediamind, NY Times, Medialets and Microsoft to name a few. The discussions resulted in simplifications and adjustments to the scope of the proposed APIs, solving problems for various constituencies.

 

Now, this process has produced MRAID (Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definition) which is still based on the ORMMA API and is similar enough that it is practical for ORMMA to share the basic API. However, there are a good number of important functions that are supported by ORMMA that won’t make it in a 1.0 version of MRAID. So, what is next?

1. A public comment period for the MRAID spec will run through September 30, 2011. After that, in the first week of October, the MRAID working group will meet again to evaluate comments received, make changes if necessary and release the final version 1.0.
2. By that time, the ORMMA members will make all the small changes necessary to the documentation and the open source code to ensure that the final MRAID v.1.0 and ORMMA share the same API wherever functions overlap. The ORMMA group wants adoption of this standard and will support vendors of commercial MRAID implementations with reference implementations for various platforms, sample ad units and clear direction for how that standard can evolve in the future.

You can download the 40-page MRAID specification here.

 

Here is a link to the full press release from the IAB.