September's Column By New Media Age Editor Mike Nutley
The history of the computer industry is a history of standards - proprietary standards such as MS-DOS and Windows, and consensual standards such as the ISO's seven-layer model for data transfer. The crucial battles are those fought to establish the dominance of one sort of standard or the other.
The same is true of interactive media, and not just at the technology level. In the past couple of months, New Media Age has reported on a series of standards-related issues across the entire industry. Most prominently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has joined forces with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) to look into the possibility of establishing a "gold standard" for measurement of reach and frequency of online advertising, to match TV's BARB and radio's Rajar. The goal is to make online advertising as easy to buy as advertising in any other medium. However, the initiative is surrounded by controversy, not least because many industry observers are suggesting that it will lead to a single company being appointed as the industry-approved supplier of such data, as has happened in Italy and New Zealand.
Questions are also being asked about whether a truly comprehensive standard can be developed at all. At the same time, the IAB is under pressure from agencies to speed up its plans for a set of standards to govern the search marketing sector. Critics are calling for the search engines to standardise their procedures for dealing with complaints, including those concerning the abuse of brand names, keyword misspellings, and whether advertisers should pay for multiple clicks from the same user within a short period of time.
Meanwhile, in the mobile marketing industry, standards for short codes are the hot topic. The four mobile operators are on the point of agreeing terms for freephone shortcodes but, following the recent agreement over shortcodes for adult content, the numbering spreads are causing concern among brands worried that they might be forced to move from a shortcode in which they have invested time and money to win recognition.
And the whole of the interactive TV sector is struggling to resolve the fundamental problem of the differing standards presented by the different platforms: satellite, cable and digital terrestrial. Until these are resolved, programme-makers and advertisers will be hamstrung by the costs involved in producing material that conforms to three different sets of requirements.
In most of these cases, the underlying questions are about where competition should take place, and who should benefit from it. Standards, whether proprietary or industry-wide, remove competition at one level while allowing it to flourish at the layer above. Microsoft, for example, argues that one of the benefits of Windows being the de facto operating system standard for personal computers is that it encourages competition among applications software companies, who have a far bigger market to operate in than if they were writing for several competing platforms. But proprietary standards can also mean monopolies, which is why proprietary technologies tend to generate an opposite reaction in favour of consensus.
The disadvantages here are that such consensus is slow to achieve, can involve compromises that mean the solution is less than ideal, and that the resulting standards can still be implemented in different flavours, neutralising the benefits of the standard. So when looking at standards, in this or any other industry, the important questions to ask are who wants them, who doesn't and what does each side stand to gain?
Michael Nutley, Editor, New Media Age, http://www.nma.co.uk/