The Weather Channel, Crisp and TringApps Announce ORMMA, the First Open Standard For Serving Rich Media Mobile Advertising

ORMMA Breaks Down the Barriers to Large-Scale Media Buys by Enabling Cross-Device/Cross-Platform Rich Media Ad Serving through a Single Open Ad Technology

NEW YORK - ORMMA, the Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising initiative, today unveiled its rich media advertising specifications and open source code to any publishers who want to serve rich media campaigns across all mobile platforms and devices. Launched by founding members The Weather Channel, Crisp, and TringApps, the ORMMA initiative is being adopted by leading players including PointRoll, Jumptap and others. The initiative is under review by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), which is expected to release a whitepaper and evaluation of ORMMA within the next three months.

“The current model for serving ads into mobile apps is broken. Publishers and app developers need to work with numerous vendors and SDKs to run campaigns across multiple platforms and devices, which greatly limits the ability to plan large-scale, mobile rich media ad buys,” stated Cameron Clayton, senior vice president of mobile and digital applications for The Weather Channel. “The mission of ORMMA is to simplify the serving of rich media ads into mobile apps by creating an open standard and industry best practices that gain contribution from - and are adopted by - leading publishers, developers and vendors.”

ORMMA proposes a vendor-agnostic approach to solving the fragmentation that exists in the mobile advertising industry--extending desktop ad serving technology to mobile apps. The ORMMA specifications utilize existing HTML5 standards, enabling ad units to be created and delivered in a simplified manner so they are compatible across all devices and platforms.

“Large publishers have gone to great lengths to make it possible to serve rich media ads into their mobile applications,” said Boris Fridman, CEO of Crisp Wireless. “ORMMA is an elegant, open-source based approach that bridges the gap between desktop and mobile and simplifies the process of serving rich media across multiple platforms and devices.”

Each of the founding members has played an integral role in development of the ORMMA initiative, with The Weather Channel leading the native implementation specifications, TringApps spearheading the multi-platform implementation, and Crisp creating the ad implementation specs.

“This technical standard avoids requiring applications to be integrated with multiple ad serving SDKs at once. We will save on time and effort by providing this universal option to our customers,” says Tarun Gaur, CEO of TringApps.

ORMMA is now open for all publishers and developers to join and contribute to the open source community, which will allow for quick development and adoption of standards and specifications. Milestones, news and blog posts will be available on the ORMMA website at www.ormma.org, which also directs users to the ORMMA Google Code Project wiki. The wiki provides an overview of the SDK and covers the proposed standards for interoperable rich media display advertising in mobile applications.





About The Weather Channel Companies
The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC) is made up of The Weather Channel television network, The Weather Channel digital properties, and Weather Services International (WSI). The Weather Channel® is based in Atlanta and is seen in more than 100 million U.S. households. TWC also operates Weatherscan, a 24-hour all-local weather network; The Weather Channel Radio Network; and The Weather Channel HD. The digital properties of TWC, which include the weather.com® site, The Weather Channel Desktop and The Weather Channel Mobile, reach more than 45 million unique users online each month and is the most popular source of online weather, news and information according to Nielsen//NetRatings. WSI, headquartered in Andover, MA, primarily provides business-to-business weather services, particularly for the media, aviation, marine and energy sectors. TWCC is owned by a consortium made up of NBC Universal and the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital. For more information, visit www.weather.com/press.

About Crisp
Crisp offers a universal ad platform for building, serving, and measuring integrated campaigns across the desktop and mobile Web, mobile apps, and tablets. Crisp’s innovative ad formats and its AdhesionTM fixed placement technology empower brands to engage with consumers and drive interaction across various channels, while simplifying creative development, streamlining ad serving, and unifying reporting for agencies. Leading brands including Estee Lauder, HBO, Intel, Marriott, Paramount Pictures, Toyota, Volkswagen, and others have utilized Crisp ads. Crisp has over 700 certified sites and apps, and has partnered with leading publishers including CBS, CNN, Hearst Magazines, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, The Weather Channel, and others. For more information visit www.crispwireless.com.

About TringApps
Tringapps is an embedded software and solutions development company. Besides turnkey mobile applications development Tringapps also has in-depth expertise in mobile content management, hosting and delivery. A number of fortune 100 companies use Tringapps for end-to-end app development and hosting services. Internet enabled TV is the new Vista Tringapps is actively working on in partnership with some of the largest OEMs. Tringapps has development and R&D centers in New York and New Jersey. For more information please visit www.tringapps.com.