WASHINGTON, D.C., June 19 – AdsMLTM 1.0, the first release of the international standard for e-commerce in the advertising industry received formal approval today from AdsML Consortium members meeting in plenary session. This validates the AdsML Standard’s use of structured electronic “envelopes” to organize and transmit the discrete sets of information necessary to bring an ad from concept to completion. It is the culmination of 18 months of effort to structure a globally consistent way of automating advertising processes across all media. In another action, the Consortium approved the formal requirements for AdsML 2.0, now under development, which will be released for public consultation in October 2004. The second phase of AdsML development will provide detailed support for several key types of e-commerce advertising transactions and build model vocabularies for ad classification and content identification. Adopted: the AdsML “Envelope” The AdsML 1.0 “envelope” is the first building block of the XML-based AdsML Standard and is the means by which information can be carried up and down the advertising supply chain. Acceptance of AdsML 1.0 is growing rapidly in Europe, North America and Asia. Three key standards bodies recently agreed to merge the booking capabilities of their standards with the international AdsML specification. “AdsML is the next step in our industry’s cooperative effort with all media and their suppliers to make the process of advertising placement, production, billing and e-commerce easier and more effective for advertisers and their agencies,” says John Sturm, president and CEO, Newspaper Association of America, Vienna, Va., U.S.A. “A cross-media standard like AdsML means advertisers will have to produce only one digital advertising ‘envelope’ for delivery to all media” AdsML 2.0: Capabilities The Phase Two activities will give users the ability to search on classified ad content, provide standards to simplify multi media usage and give advertisers a vehicle for exchanging electronic business documents directly with publishers. Housing, recruitment, transportation and travel are the first classified ad categories for which model vocabularies will be developed. These controlled vocabularies are at the core of definitions that ultimately will simplify the exchange and processing of all advertisements of any type and for any media. “AdsML 1.0 was about building a foundation: it was critical work that had to be done, but it wasn’t particularly exciting,” says Tony Stewart, chair, AdsML Consortium Technical Working Group, RivCom Ltd., New York. “With AdsML 2.0 we are directly attacking some of the business problems that cost advertisers and publishers time and money: for the advertisers, automatically reconciling invoices with orders; for the publishers, automatically matching artwork with bookings, and for everyone, removing the barriers involved in processing and syndicating classified ads to multiple publications and media. Now everyone can see how AdsML will directly impact their bottom line, which is a much more exciting place to be.” About the AdsML Consortium. The mission of the AdsML Consortium is to develop an open standard that will unify and extend existing advertising standards and automate advertising business processes — across all types of media, for all stages of the lifecycle of an advertisement, across all segments of the advertising industry, worldwide. It is an initiative supported by Ifra, a leading international association for newspaper and media publishing, and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), which represents more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. The Consortium’s strategic partners are Agfa and Associated Newspapers Ltd.