• by Felicia Greiff , April 29, 2016

The IAB Tech Lab released a roadmap for its LEAN (light, encrypted, AdChoice-supported, non-invasive ads) scoring tool Friday -- and announced that in fourth-quarter 2016, a scoring algorithm will be in place to publicly rank publishers, advertisers and agencies on how they adhere to LEAN principles. 

In a blog post, Brendan Riordan-Butterworth, director-technical standards, IAB, said the organization believes the best and fastest way to encourage adoption of LEAN is through the public ranking system, comparing it to food nutrition labels that drive marketing of more healthful foods.

"Think of a LEAN score as your Fitbit for healthier advertising," Riordan-Butterworth said in the post.

Here's a summary of the roadmap: 

-- This quarter, the team behind LEAN will formalize the data onboarding and the criteria process; start a conversation on guidance; and complete initial user experience testing.  

-- In the third quarter, LEAN will focus on onboarding data and criteria from publishers, marketers, and agencies; publishing the LEAN scoring criteria in iterations; and do more user experience testing.

-- In the fourth quarter, LEAN scoring algorithms will be created, and the IAB will publish its first findings and recommendations for rolling out the LEAN scorecard. 

-- At the end of 2016, the IAB Tech Lab will evaluate criteria with "an eye to understanding the impact of each individual criterion relative to all others in order to establish a scoring system," Riordan-Butterworth said in the blog. "This will provide a structure for decisions about what advertising experiences meet the goals across consumer, publisher, and advertiser requirements."

The post from Riordan-Butterworth also listed some initial suggestions on file size, ad load time, encryption, AdChoice, skippable ads and more. 

Last October, IAB SVP-technology and ad ops Scott Cunningham said in a blog post that the organization "messed up," adding that "as technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." Read more on the creation of LEAN here.