There has been a lot of news coming out of the IAB Annual Leadership Conference this week.  On Monday, Crisp Media's Nathan Carver was awarded the IAB Service Excellence Award for his contribution to the IAB's Mobile Rich-media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID) project.  We congratulate Nathan and thank him for his tireless efforts to move the industry forward through the development of industry standards.

The MRAID project was developed to define a common API for mobile rich media ads that run in mobile apps, which is an offshoot of Crisp's leadership in the creation of the Open Rich Media for Mobile Advertising (ORMMA) standards, which were ultimately incorporated into the MRAID standards.

We are also thrilled to say that the IAB has selected Adhesion and Capsize as winners of its Mobile Rising Stars competition.  Out of more than 60 entries, the Adhesion banner was named a winning ad product concept. Crisp also won with the Capsize format in the Full Page category of the competition.

Adhesion is a persistent, above-the-fold, overlay ad placement for smartphones and tablets that outperform standard banners by more than 2 to 1.  Capsize eliminates the need for multiple creative sizes, and maintains the beauty of the ad in both portrait and landscape views.  Capsize uses a background image design that is safe for both portrait and landscape cropping, and leverages CSS to automatically adjust the width and height of the foreground elements without any flickering or reloading that could degrade the user experience.  

In total, five Mobile Rising Stars Ad Concepts have been named winners. The IAB Rising Stars will now be evaluated in the marketplace based on consumer and business adoption, and the new IAB standard ad units will be graduated in the first quarter of 2013 to official IAB Standard Ad Unit status.