World's biggest brands join forces to improve online ads

Online ads have become a bit of a cesspool for fraud, ineptitude and other consumer-antagonistic trends -- and advertisers know it.

That's why a group of the world's biggest brands and their trade groups are teaming up on a new initiative aimed at tracking the quality of digital advertising in order to avoid sending customers to ad blockers.

The coalition, announced Thursday at the Dmexco conference in Cologne, Germany, will use forthcoming tools from the Interactive Advertising Bureau's tech lab to track everything from creative merit to load time.

Among the participating members are Google, Facebook, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, the 4As, the Association of National Advertisers, the World Federation of Advertisers, the Washington Post, GroupM and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

“This broad Coalition provides the opportunity for our industry to unite behind a common effort with the potential to drive change globally,” said IAB Europe CEO Townsend Feehan.

The group also plans to determine a set of specific standards to which all ads must abide based on feedback from consumers and marketers.

The push is not unlike one undertaken by the IAB last fall in which it apologized to consumers and released new rules for online ads.

"We messed up," the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Scott Cunningham said at the time. "Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty."

The drive for better ads is mostly a response to the threat posed by a global uptick in the number of web surfers shutting out ads with blockers. Earlier this week, that industry's biggest service, AdBlock Plus, said it would start selling ads, incensing the media and ad industries.

Even as marketers look to shape up their industry, the number of people using ad blockers continues to grow; Emarketer projects that nearly 30 percent of internet users will have them by next year.