Companies including The Weather Channel, Crisp Wireless and Tringapps have created what’s called the “Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising Initiative (ORMMA)” with the simple aim of providing interoperability for mobile ad-units within the mobile ad-serving community.
The ORMMA Initiative proposes a vendor-agnostic approach to solving the fragmentation that exists in the mobile advertising industry – extending desktop ad serving technology to mobile apps. The ORMMA specifications utilize existing HTML5 standards, enabling ad units to be created and delivered in a simplified manner so they are compatible across all devices and platforms. Today, the group unveiled its rich media advertising specifications and open source code to any publishers wanting to utilize them.
The initiative is already being adopted by leading players including PointRoll, Jumptap and others. The initiative is also under review by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), which is expected to release a whitepaper and evaluation of ORMMA initiative within the next three months.
“The current model for serving ads into mobile apps is broken. Publishers and app developers need to work with numerous vendors and SDKs to run campaigns across multiple platforms and devices, which greatly limits the ability to plan large-scale, mobile rich media ad buys,” stated Cameron Clayton, senior vice president of mobile and digital applications for The Weather Channel. “The mission of ORMMA is to simplify the serving of rich media ads into mobile apps by creating an open standard and industry best practices that gain contribution from – and are adopted by – leading publishers, developers and vendors.”
