Please review the IAB Tech Lab Open Source Initiative Governance guidelines here for contributing to this project.

SHARC is an acronym for Safe HTML Ad Rich-media Container. Our goal is to design, develop, and maintain an API that manages an ad container that works cross-platform.

Our Motto: Write one ad; serve it anywhere!

SHARC is born of two previous IAB Tech Lab standards: SafeFrame and MRAID (Mobile Richmedia Ad Interface Definition). SafeFrame was designed to work in web and MRAID was designed to work in-app on mobile devices. Designing an ad for a cross-platform campaign meant designing at least two different ads to work with two different standards. Besides the lack of cross-platform compatibility, each standard had its limitations for control and performance.

One complaint from consumers on ads is having a bad ad experience, such as an ad that plays audio when it’s not supposed to or an ad that won’t close when it’s supposed to. Complaints from advertisers and ad developers is a lack of clarity around which controls to provide and how to control them. For example, in some cases the ad supplies a close button while in others, the publisher provides a close button. And whether one or both close buttons are provided, neither operator may know that a consumer wants to close the ad or who should execute the close. Complaints from publishers include a lack of clear definition between ad content and page content. Publishers need to protect their pages or apps from potentially harmful ads, whether it’s just a badly designed ad or an intentionally malicious ad. Because of this lack of clarity in execution, troubleshooting and reporting can be time consuming.

Our aim for this project is to take the best of both SafeFrame and MRAID worlds and create an ad container that provides seamless abilities to interact with an ad—no matter where it’s served. Ad developers should know exactly what controls to provide and the expected result for real time execution. Publishers should be able to clearly delineate page content from ad content with ultimate control over protecting their pages and apps from broken or malicious ads.

Transparency for all parties, a clean and seamless rich ad experience that just works, and the ability to write one ad that can be served anywhere will save everyone a lot of headache and frustration.

To bring SHARC to life, we need your help. SHARC is in the beginning phase of development. As of July 2021, we’re working on a proof of concept based on some initial use cases and requirements. As part of the IAB Open Source initiative, anyone can participate. Email Katie Stroud with any questions or to get more information.