LEIPZIG, Germany, 15 October 2003 -- The AdsML Consortium, developers of AdsMLTM 1.0 (a comprehensive, international standard for the digital exchange of advertising information that was released this week), and the AdVentureTM project, a regional initiative of media agencies and publishers in the Netherlands, announced an agreement to share information on business process analyses and leverage each other’s efforts to bring order to the complexities of advertising in local and global markets. The two standards-developing groups will focus on bringing their complementary standards into alignment. “We look forward to working closely with the AdVenture team during the upcoming year,” says Tony Stewart, chair of the AdsML Technical Working Group and director of consulting for RivCom, the AdsML Consortium’s project office in Swindon, U.K. “Organizations all over the world will benefit from the work they have done to define, improve and streamline their core process flows and to develop XML message formats to transmit them. We plan to use that information to enhance the Advertising Component Interactions within AdsML 1.0 and to increase the value of the Advertising Standards Matrix, which is a companion to the newly published standard, to potential adopters and implementers.” Compatible Standards “Working with AdsML will greatly increase the possibilities of expanding AdVenture outside the present limited scope of printed media in the Netherlands,” adds Cees van den Heuvel, business information director of NRp Dagbladen, the association of regional newspapers in The Netherlands and an AdVenture founder. NRp Dagbladen is in Amstelveen. AdsML and AdVenture plan to pool technical and other resources in order to further streamline business processes and avoid duplication of effort. The AdVenture and AdsML approaches and mechanisms are fully compatible and complementary, say the developers. Their desire to cooperate reflects growing efforts to govern the end-to-end flow of digitally-transmitted advertising information across all media, throughout the world. The organizations represent two different approaches to the challenges facing the industry and work at different levels of the advertising workflow. AdsML takes a global, umbrella-like approach and, with the release of AdsML 1.0, has developed a powerful mechanism for distributing messages via open communications across borders. AdsML 1.0 is designed to solve problems related to communications between a potentially unlimited set of global trading partners using the Internet as their network. At present, AdVenture limits its scope to the order fulfillment process for print media in The Netherlands. In its initial implementation, it will use an online, third-party communications network that is protected and open only to participants. (Participation is open to the industry.) Within this environment, it has constructed a dynamic model for fulfilling orders and administratively handling contracts. AdVenture is implementing the first phase of their standard this week, making it one of the first organizations in the world to successfully demonstrate the benefits of standards-based integration of media agencies’ and publishers’ systems.