MUMBAI: Ormma, the Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising initiative, today unveiled its rich media advertising specifications and open source code to any publishers who want to serve rich media campaigns across all mobile platforms and devices.
Launched by founding members The Weather Channel, Crisp, and TringApps in the US, the Ormma initiative is being adopted by leading players including PointRoll, Jumptap and others.
The initiative is under review by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), which is expected to release a whitepaper and evaluation of ORMMA within the next three months.
Crisp offers a universal ad platform for building, serving, and measuring integrated campaigns across the desktop and mobile Web, mobile apps, and tablets. Tringapps is an embedded software and solutions development company.
The Weather Channel senior VP of mobile and digital applications Cameron Clayton said, "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.
"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."
Ormma 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 utilise existing HTML5 standards, enabling ad units to be created and delivered in a simplified manner so they are compatible across all devices and platforms.
Crisp Wireless CEO Boris Fridman said, "Large publishers have gone to great lengths to make it possible to serve rich media ads into their mobile applications. Ormma is an elegant, open-source based approach that bridges the gap between desktop and mobile and simplifies the process of serving rich media across multiple platforms and devices."
Each of the founding members has played an integral role in development of the Ormma initiative, with The Weather Channel leading the native implementation specifications, TringApps spearheading the multi-platform implementation, and Crisp creating the ad implementation specs.
TringApps CEO Tarun Gaur said, "This technical standard avoids requiring applications to be integrated with multiple ad serving SDKs at once. We will save on time and effort by providing this universal option to our customers".
Ormma is now open for all publishers and developers to join and contribute to the open source community, which will allow for quick development and adoption of standards and specifications. Milestones, news and blog posts will be available on the ORMMA website at www.ormma.org, which also directs users to the ORMMA Google Code Project wiki. The wiki provides an overview of the SDK and covers the proposed standards for interoperable rich media display advertising in mobile applications.
