Australia’s leading advertising industry bodies announced today that they have established a working group to design and publish a common set of best-practice operating standards to improve transparency in the digital advertising supply chain, to reduce fraud and improve brand safety.

The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA), the Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia (IAB) and the Media Federation of Australia (MFA) will draw extensively from best practice solutions being developed in overseas markets and seek input from all interested parties to ensure the standards are universally applicable, practical and relevant.

“Many major advertisers, particularly the global players, have moved to introduce standards to ensure they have better visibility over where their digital advertising appears. However, it is important that all advertisers, both big and small, are better equipped to reduce or eliminate advertising that is wasteful or, worse still, may cause brand reputational damage,” the AANA’s CEO, John Broome said.

Vijay Solanki, IAB Australia CEO commented “IAB has already produced many standards and guidelines including for viewability, brand safety and ad fraud, but this opportunity to join with AANA and MFA will enable us to bring these forward to absolute world best practice for all in the digital supply chain.”

“We will draw on the relevant expertise of our members and participants will include representatives from the major advertisers, media agencies, platform providers and publishers.  We all share the goal of producing meaningful and actionable standards that will significantly improve brand safety and transparency in the digital advertising space,” said Sophie Madden, MFA CEO.

The three Associations will convene the first Working Group meeting this quarter and provide details of its timeline and activities in early 2018.