GroupM will convene media companies including Disney, NBCUniversal, YouTube, Roku and Telly to create standards for new streaming and digital video ad formats. The WPP media agency today announced the Ad Innovation Accelerator, which will seek to ease the process of developing creative for interactive ad formats across different platforms.

“We don’t want to have to develop four very different versions of [an ad] to make it work everywhere,” said Mike Fisher, executive director of investment innovation at GroupM, referring to the different specifications advertisers have to account for when marketing across the ever-growing number of streaming platforms. “We want a base version that works everywhere.”

The Ad Innovation Accelerator will also include Brightline and Kerv, two of the tech companies creating interactive ad formats, such as shoppable ads, that are becoming more prevalent as streaming capabilities advance. The program will roll out first to North America clients for GroupM’s Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom.

Fisher said that “top of the agenda is to put everybody in a room together so the media sellers can hear directly from the clients what is on their wish list, and what media sellers can be doing to make [interactive ads] easier, more performant and more measurable for clients.”

Step two will be action. GroupM hopes the group will have co-created ad formats capable of running across all participating partners by the end of the first quarter so that the agency can take learnings into this year’s upfront negotiations, Fisher said. The Ad Innovation Accelerator plans to host quarterly meetings with clients and partners to set goals and establish new ad models. And, in the end, GroupM hopes to implement new industry standards as well as gather data on where formats perform most effectively in the digital video ecosystem. 

“There’s a lot of different A/B testing that we’ve done to date that hasn’t always been as effective as it can be because some of these tests aren’t happening at scale in the same way that GroupM will be facilitating,” said Kristina Shepard, VP, global ad sales and partnerships at Roku. Shepard hopes the Ad Innovation Accelerator will address engagement impact for QR codes versus click-to-interact ads as well as sequencing for interactive ads paired with 30-second spots, among other questions.

The main goal of the initiative is to create technical standards for streaming and digital video platforms that will make it easier for advertisers to launch interactive ad campaigns across partners with different tech stacks and ad servers, said Shepard. But it could also drive more business for the media sellers. As GroupM can both prove and curate the usefulness of streaming ad formats for clients, Shepard predicts a larger percentage of dollars will be allocated toward streaming platforms.

Currently, “brands come to streaming as an extension of traditional television, meaning they’re simply running their same 15- or 30-second ad, even though streaming provides the capabilities of digital,” said Shepard. “But there are barriers that are keeping advertisers from leaning in to more innovation and more creativity. GroupM is taking a leadership position to bring both media partners and creative partners together, and creating that interoperability means that a brand can come to Roku and all the other streaming players and create one asset and run that more broadly across the entire streaming space.” Shepard predicts this will increase the engagement possible for interactive ads as more viewers are served them and learn to use them.

GroupM’s recent “This Year, Next Year” forecast for 2024 predicts that ad spending on connected TV will increase nearly 15% in North America this year. 

While the Ad Innovation Accelerator includes major streaming players such as NBCUniversal and Disney (the latter of which has sat out of other recent cross-industry initiatives), GroupM’s Fisher also thinks it will help progress traditional media companies’ willingness to align with tech companies in the video market, like a YouTube.