Swindon, UK, 31 March 2004 -- The developers of three existing standards for the transmission of advertising data have agreed to merge their standards with the international AdsML Specification, the AdsML Consortium has announced. The AdsML Consortium will deliver a suite of related standards this year that will allow advertisers and publishers to exchange booking information about any kind of print or online ad. The developers of CRESTTM 2.0, Ifra AdConnexion 2.0 and SpaceXML have agreed to merge the booking capabilities of their standards into the international AdsML Specification. Their efforts will culminate in the release of e-commerce exchange specifications next fall. AdsML 1.0 was released in October, 2003. Four organizations combine efforts The AdsML Consortium is working with Ifra, a leading international association for newspaper and media publishing that owns the Ifra AdConnexion standard, the Newspaper Association of America, which owns CREST and co-owns SpaceXML, and IDEAlliance, which shares in the ownership of SpaceXML. CREST is a North American standard that governs the exchange of data about classified display and liner ads. SpaceXML also was developed for the North American market and supports display advertising. Ifra AdConnexion was developed for the European market and also is oriented toward display advertising. The merger of the three standards will define the Booking Standard of the AdsML Specification, which will provide full support for booking classified, display and insert advertising in all markets, worldwide. Planning for multiple media, regional needs This AdsML development phase will bring together the relevant capabilities of the three standards and convert them into a structure suitable for inclusion of other media types and for specialization to accommodate the needs of different regions. It is likely, say Consortium representatives, that the project will use concepts from the CICA framework for building XML e-commerce messages that the Data Interchange Standards Association (DISA) in the United States is developing. “Our goal for this project is simple,” says Tony Stewart, director of consulting for RivCom, UK, and chair of the Consortium’s Technical Working Group. “We want to make the advertising booking process seamless, efficient and cheap.” Standards merger eliminates confusion, provides one-stop-shopping By bringing together their three standards under the AdsML umbrella, Ifra, the NAA and IDEAlliance have eliminated a source of marketplace confusion and duplication of effort. With the release of the Booking Standard, advertisers, publishers and their software vendors will be able to focus their efforts on supporting a single global standard for exchanging advertising booking information. This will improve communications in the marketplace, reduce the costs of integrating publishers’ and advertisers’ systems, and break down regional barriers in the increasingly global advertising industry.