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AdsML will help fill gaps -- quickly

The AdsML initiative introduced last month has one broad goal in mind: to make life easier on all the business partners involved in the advertising lifecycle. And with development of AdsML 1.0 already at an advanced stage, the essence of this initiative will soon go a long way toward a more specific goal of providing an XML “packaging mechanism” that allows business partners to exchange information in a more efficient way.
 
 That specific goal is the first part of a broader two-fold mission that the AdsML Consortium has set out to accomplish, says Tony Stewart, director of consulting for RivCom Ltd., which is tasked with guiding the specifications process of the initiative. The second part of that mission is “to converge and rationalise the existing standards for such information (e.g. AdConnexion, SPACE/XML, CREST, etc.) in order to reduce overlaps and inconsistencies between them and ensure that there is a recognised way to interchange each type of required information.” Stewart says this is indeed the taller task of the two.

But with AdsML 1.0 targeted for release in October at IfraExpo 2003 in Leipzig, Stewart says it “will take a big step” toward simplifying the exchange of information by releasing standards for the AdsML “Envelope” and “Response” messages (see diagram below). “This Envelope provides a straightforward or easy-to-implement packaging mechanism for exchanging advertising information in XML messages,” Stewart says.

According to Stewart, when an organisation receives such a message, it can use the information in the Envelope header to perform the first line of required processing: make sure the message comes from a trusted sender, make sure that the types of information in it conform to any business agreements between the sender and recipient, make sure that it “understands” and can process this information, and then prioritise and route the information to the appropriate internal systems (such as a booking system, a page layout system, or an accounting system). “If the information in the Envelope does not meet the recipient’s requirements,” Stewart says, “the AdsML Response mechanism will provide a standard format by which the recipient can inform the sender of the problem.”

The underlying design concept here, says Stewart, is that the meaningful information or business objects (called “AdsML Items”) contained within an AdsML Envelope are themselves XML documents which could, in theory, have been sent as stand-alone messages. “In fact, that’s how they are arriving now in systems that have been built to support such messages, since of course there isn’t any AdsML Envelope out there,” he says. “The problem that arises is that as trading partners start exchanging more and more different kinds of messages, using various XML standards for them, it can be a huge and expensive hassle just to build routing systems that can receive all these different types of messages and decide what to do with each one. The Envelope and Response mechanisms in AdsML 1.0 make this problem go away by providing a standardised way to wrap each Item with the information necessary to verify and route it. Implementors can build this system just once, and know that each time they add a trading partner that is AdsML compliant, they don’t have to tweak or rebuild their message routing systems.”

It is expected that this first version will be implemented “by at least some of our members within the months immediately thereafter (of the release) so we can get valuable feedback about the effectiveness of the mechanism,” Stewart says.

As for the second part of the overall equation — to weed through the numerous business objects associated with the advertising lifecycle and to ensure there is an appropriate XML standard for exchanging this type of information — Stewart says there is a lot of work ahead. He says today business partners can choose from several advertising-specific standards (such as AdConnexion, SPACE/XML, CREST, and probably others) that cover some of the required information, but that also overlap each other and leave many gaps. Then there are a number of relevant non-advertising-specific standards, such as for exchanging invoices or payment information, that members could easily adopt, but there are quite a lot of these out there, too. “So it will save everyone time and money if we can quickly agree on just one or two such standards, rather than having each big player pick a different one and insist that its trading partners use that one,” Stewart says.

Then another challenge: there are parts of the advertising process (for example, ratecards and campaign briefs) for which no formal standard exists.

“We want to avoid a plethora of new standards popping up to fill the gaps here,” Stewart says. “We also want to work with the groups that control the existing standards to help converge them where they currently overlap, and delineate them where they don’t overlap, so as to make life less complex (and costly) for members of the industry going forward. So while it is correct that we don’t want to ‘compete’ with them, we do feel we have a role to play in that area. At a minimum, we will be recommending what standards to use for each type of information that is commonly carried inside an AdsML Envelope. At a maximum, we may find that there are types of advertising-specific information that partners need to transmit, for which no suitable standard exists, and for which the AdsML Technical Working Group is actually the best group to create the standard. In that case, rather than recommending to some other group that they define the XML format for this type of information, we would take on the task ourselves.”

If there are gaps in the print advertising lifecycle, one can imagine the challenge that multiple media presents. David Jones, GM of Vio Worldwide and a representative for the suppliers on the initiative, gives this example: “Conventions about how ads are displayed in print and on the web are different as would be expected from such different media. None of the existing standards cater for allthe presentational permutations of these media. When certain concepts in one medium are not recognised in a different medium, it is difficult, to say the least, to control satisfactorily the movement of data between the two media. When you think about how many new sorts of media there are, you can imagine the gaps that can emerge.”

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