PC World – December 2015

To encourage better practices, the IAB’s Tech Lab is starting a new
program called the L.E.A.N. Ads, which stands for Light, Encrypted,
Ad choice supported and Non-invasive ads, Cunningham wrote.
The program is designed to guide future online advertising
standards and best practices. Cunningham wrote it will address
issues such as retargeting, a practice where a targeted ad is shown
to people when they’re on other websites. He wrote that people
should not be retargeted after they’ve made a purchase.
Also, the online ad industry should address the volume of ads that
are on a webpage and viewability, a term for determining if a person
has actually seen an ad that was served to a webpage.
The IAB has also been encouraging (go.pcworld.com/adencryption)
advertising companies to deliver ads using encryption, which can
help reduce the problems of malicious ads popping up on webpages
that try to attack users’ computers, known as malvertising.
There is a sense of urgency to the IAB’s plan as people increasingly
use mobile devices to browse the web. PageFair and Adobe’s report
said that ad blocking tools aren’t widely used yet on mobiles, but
that could become more common.
Apple, for example, now allows the use of ad blocking software in
iOS 9. Within days of the new OS’s release, several ad-blocking tools
were widely downloaded.
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