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MMA Support Broadens the Reach of ORMMA Internationally; Making it Easier for Advertisers to Run Campaigns Across Multiple Publishers and Applications

NEW YORK – June 16, 2011 –  ORMMA, the Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising initiative, today announced that the MMA ( Mobile Marketing Association) will support the ORMMA rich media mobile advertising initiative.  ORMMA is an initiative driven by a consortium of companies from across the mobile advertising spectrum that collaborate to resolve interoperability and technology issues which hamper the growth and scale of rich media mobile advertising by creating an open standard and set of industry best practices.  By showing its support for ORMMA, the MMA extends the reach of open standards internationally and lends its weight to overcoming the fragmentation plaguing mobile advertisers.  Since ORMMA was founded in 2010 by Crisp Media and The Weather Channel; the initiative has grown to more than 20 member companies from across the mobile advertising ecosystem, including AdMarvel, Admeld, Celtra, Gannett, Goldspot Media, mOcean, Nexage, PointRoll, Ringleader Digital, Rhythm NewMedia and others.

“ORMMA addresses two key stumbling blocks facing mobile advertisers – ad SDK interoperability and consistent measurement across applications and sites.  By having open standards we are making it easier for agencies to run rich media campaigns across applications to achieve greater reach, without having to adapt their creative formats or ad serving,” said Michael Becker, managing director of North America for the MMA.  “On behalf of our members, the MMA will analyze the contributions of ORMMA, identify additional needs and contribute to its proliferation across our global membership.”

“The Weather Channel adopted the ORMMA standard to get rid of the headache of incorporating multiple ad SDKs into our apps and to make it easier for our advertisers to deliver HTML5 rich media ads to our audience,” said Cameron Clayton, executive vice president of digital products for The Weather Channel.  “To the delight of our creative team, we recently rolled out our first ORMMA-compliant campaigns, which deliver a robust user experience and greatly improved ad tracking.  Without all the ad vendor integrations, we are now able to roll out application updates more frequently to better satisfy our customers.”

The goal of ORMMA is allow ad developers to create one campaign that can run across a universe of mobile applications and sites, without sacrificing a rich user experience.  Since its founding, ORMMA has developed a specification for an open API that unlocks all native capabilities for iOS and Android devices, allowing advertisers to create ads using HTML5 standards that can access all the native features of the device, such as location, shaking, and more. ORMMA is also developing capabilities that ORMMA-compliant developers can include in their advertising SDKs, including support for ad caching, polite loading, and increased privacy controls.  In addition to support from the MMA, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has adopted the ORMMA API to create the MRAID standard, which creates an ad interface definition that enables ad units to communicate with the medium they are served on using a standard API.

“The MMA’s support of ORMMA is a big step forward to creating an industry standard that makes rich media ad serving easier for everyone,” said Xavier Facon, chief technical officer of Crisp Media. “Publishers and developers won’t have to worry about another SDK to implement and advertisers have the peace-of-mind of knowing that their ads will run and work consistently across apps, sites, and devices.”

Companies interested in joining ORMMA should visit the ORMMA blog, join the Discussion Group, or visit the Google Code Project.

About ORMMA

ORMMA, or the Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising initiative, was founded in November 2010 to simplify the serving of rich media ads into mobile applications by creating an open standard and set of industry best practices.  Founded by leading mobile advertising companies Crisp Media, The Weather Channel, TringApps, Jumptap, and PointRoll, the open initiative has grown to include over 20 member companies.  Through an open source forum, ORMMA has released three-levels of standards and best practices for adoption by publishers, developers, and vendors. For more information visit http://blog.ormma.org.