GoldSpot Media, which specialises in mobile rich media and video advertising solutions, has launched the Open Mobile Advertising Alliance to accelerate adoption of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) forthcoming MRAID (Mobile Rich-media Ad Interface Definitions) spec. for mobile rich media ads. This new standards-based solution empowers the advertising industry to seamlessly transact in-app mobile advertising across all smartphones and tablets.

GoldSpot believes that the mobile rich media ad industry is far from scalable, citing resource-intensive proprietary integrations, weekly SDK updates, under-delivering rich media ecosystems and broken mobile ad server functionality as the principal culprits. GoldSpot Media has been collaborating with the IAB and Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising (ORMMA) to develop a solution that eliminates the fragmentation in mobile advertising. IAB is expected to ratify its MRAID version 1.0 specifications in early September.

The GoldSpot Media in-app SDK for iOS and Android enhances the pioneering contributions to the ORMMA open source project and is available at no charge to participants of the Open Mobile Advertising Alliance. Partners can optionally enable advanced features such as ad caching, frequency capping and video overlays.

“Publishers in the mobile advertising ecosystem are frustrated with today’s disparate online and mobile ad serving infrastructures,” says Cameron Clayton, EVP Digital Products at The Weather Channel Companies and co-chair of the IAB Mobile Committee. “Initiatives such as the Open Mobile Advertising Alliance bridge the compatibility gap between any ad server and mobile rich media vendors.”

GoldSpot’s white-label solution plugs into a publisher’s existing ad server via an open campaign interface. Publishers can sell digital effectively, says GoldSpot, as they can use their existing inventory forecasting and other ad server functions, while maximizing their mobile revenues by selling MRAID-compliant ads from any rich media vendor, as soon as they are available. 

“For a highly scalable mobile advertising ecosystem, advertisers and agencies should be allowed to focus on driving marketing goals, without being restrained by technology hurdles,” says GoldSpot Media founder and CEO, Srini Dharmaji. “Similarly, a publisher should be free to focus on driving higher ad revenues through engaging ad campaigns using state of the art creative ad units without significantly increasing their CapEx and OpEx. The Open Mobile Advertising Alliance helps make that a reality for our publisher and advertiser customers.”

There’s more information about the Open Mobile Advertising Alliance here.