• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, October 1, 2012

The Interactive Advertising Bureau on Monday said the eight Rising Stars ad formats introduced earlier this year have so far yielded better results than standard IAB units in display campaigns.

To measure the new units’ impact and results for brand advertisers, IAB and research partner Moat tested 4 million ad impressions, examining five of the six Rising Stars ad formats – the Portrait, Slider, Sidekick, Billboard and Filmstrip – against two earlier IAB standard banner ad units (300x250 and 728x90).

The testing also included a pair of new metrics: Universal Interaction Rate (UIR), the percent of users who intentionally enter the frame of the ad for at least half a second, and Universal Interaction Time (UIT), the average amount of time users spend on the ad.

Among the key findings:

-Users spent approximately 50% more time (UIT) interacting with an ad through the Rising Stars format (5.8 seconds) versus the legacy standard IAB ad units (3.9 seconds)

-The rate by which consumers interacted with an ad (UIR) through the Rising Stars format compared with the older IAB standard ad unit more than doubled – 9.6% versus 3.9%.

Working with agencies BBDO, BBH, Mindshare, Razorfish and SapientNitro, the online display ad campaigns were tested from brands such as AT&T, Jeep, Unilever/Axe and Westin Hotels & Resorts. The campaigns were tracked on sites including AOL, Forbes, MSN, Viacom and Yahoo. The ads were created using tools from DoubleClick/Google, MediaMind, Pictela and PointRoll.