The follow up to the Big Ad. This is the latest advert from Carlton Draught.

Superbanners are a thing of the past, as is the thingey ad thing at the top of the page! The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) of Australia has introduced new standards that will make buying, selling and discussing online media with your traditional friends much more easier.

‘Leaderboards’ will now become the name for the 728×60 pixel space commonly seen on the top of webpages, and in recent times usurping the long-standing 468×60, which is now known as a ’standard banner’.

The IAB hopes that this move will “standardise” the medium of online advertising, bringing it into a more mature medium with accepted, industry-wide formats equivalent to the 30-second TVC or the full-page print ad.

The new standards are as follows:

• Leaderboard 728×90
• Medium Rectangle 300x 250
• Wide Skyscraper 160×600
• Standard Banner 468×60

These four standardisations form the ‘Australian Universal Ad Package’.

Further, in a world first for online advertising standards, the IAB along with the Advertising Federation of Australia and the Media Federation of Australia have included a basic GetURL/ClickTAG conformity in the agreement. An expected reduction in ClickTAG errors through this clarity means further efficiencies in trafficking. All good news for the online advertisers out there.

Following the highly successful 2005 Australia Day lamb campaign, Sam Kekovich is back.

In this year’s Australia Day lamb TV commercial Sam again provides one of his trademark monologues about unAustralianism.

This year he outlines how lamb could have prevented many recent incidences of unAustralianism, and to be Australian all you need to do is whack some nice juicy lamb chops on the barbie this Australia Day.

The commercials will be airing nationally from Sunday 15th January until Australia Day, 26th January. These are supported by radio and press advertising and with retail point-of-sale in butcher stores and supermarkets nationally.

Carlton Draught’s Big Ad wont be launched until August 7, however more than half a million people have already seen the advert, as it moves virally across the Internet.

Whilst it’s a little way of Subservient Chicken and 20 milltion views in its first week, it still illustrates the reach achievable with the medium, something simply not attainable through more traditional means.

Foster’s General Manager for Regular Beer Matt Keen says,

“The advertising arena has become more fragmented. TV is still the way to market but the digital arena is becoming increasingly important, it’s also a way of engaging with drinkers personally. When they watch a television commercial there will be a number of other distractions … it’s shown among other ads and there’s generally a lot of noise about, but when people are sitting at their computers we know they’ve taken the time to see the ad; they’ve engaged with it. And that’s important.

And you can now watch the ad if you’ve not already seen it.