The Importance of Being Earnest

By Julie Preis

One of the biggest challenges in Mobile Marketing today is a lack of standardization which, as we all know, can result in confusion and inefficiencies.  Fortunately, many of the industry constituents and organizations have committed to work together on an on-going basis to foster growth and reduce waste.  This has resulted in initiatives like the IAB/MMA’s Mobile Phone Creative Guidelines (http://www.iab.net/mobileguidelines) and the Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions or MRAID (http://www.iab.net/mraid) specification.

While these are both good initiatives and the Mobile Marketing ecosystem will greatly benefit from their proliferation and adoption, the real value comes from the input of the participants, who sacrifice their time and energy simply because they believe in the future of mobile marketing and are passionate about its success.  Without these dedicated change agents, aligning interests to solve some of the industry’s most difficult problems would be nearly impossible.

Because of this, I have to commend the IAB for calling out participants who have been particularly instrumental in working through the details of some of these specifications.  I’m happy to say that Mocean Mobile’s own Director of Integrations, Aron Schatz, is among the folks being honored for his hard work and dedication to finalizing the MRAID 2.0 specification.  Aron focuses on enabling technologies that work across the industry because recognizes that standards decrease the cost of implementation and increase the availability and reach for everyone.

Not only did Aron contribute to the initial draft, comments and revisions of the standards over months of meetings with the MRAID committee, but he also built his own MRAID 2.0 creative to ensure that the specification was fully functional and usable.  The MRAID specification is very important to the mobile marketing ecosystem, as it creates an interface for app developers to be able to monetize their inventory with richer experiences – delivering a maximized ROI to the advertiser while allowing the app developer to drive higher revenue.

Aron will be accepting his IAB Service Excellence Award at the Annual Leadership Meeting on February 24^th in Phoenix, AZ.  Way to go, Aron!  You are truly an industry great!