NEW YORK (US): Barely a month after introducing the industry's first and only Online Format Suite - a set of online ad formats designed to foster workable standards for the online medium - Unicast has released standard design and development specifications for creating and buying In Between-Page, Over-Page and In-Page units.

These standards eliminate the time consuming and costly process which agencies currently face recreating the same ad for different sites in their campaigns, claims Unicast.

The Online Format Suite was created to replicate the same standardization and structure that media buyers have in offline media in order to increase efficiency and advertiser confidence in the online medium to accelerate the rate of budget allocation and spending. The company claims that the release of these design and development standard specifications is a landmark development for the creation and placement of online advertising and streamlines what heretofore has been a confusing and ponderous process for agencies. Assuming that an average online campaign is bought across 10 Web sites, and involves at least two different formats, agencies and advertisers have been faced with the possibility of having to create 30 different executions and conduct an equal number of negotiations/scheduling calls.

A standard offering from over 1000 publishers and ad networks world wide, Unicast's Online Format Suite enables advertisers to utilize their offline assets including commercials, to create In Between-Page (superstitial) ads to anchor their online campaigns, extend these messages in Over-Page and In- Page units to achieve overall consistency and message reinforcement. This single source solution eliminates the duplicative and time consuming process of multiple negotiations making online advertising a more efficient medium to operate in. Unicast believes this generic approach will motivate advertisers to increase the percentage of their budget allocated online advertising.