In a potentially big step toward providing a more consistent privacy experience for consumers on mobile, the Digital Advertising Alliance today is issuing guidelines for how to display its icon on mobile platforms.

The AdChoices icon, which is already familiar to some on desktops and laptops, lets consumers know how information about their online activity is being gathered. The new creative guidelines follow the DAA?s announcement last summer of how marketers could implement the organization?s self-regulatory principles in mobile environments.

?At the end of the day, what success looks like for us is that there is a consistent privacy notice user experience,? said Lou Mastria, executive director at DAA, New York. ?You see the icon, are able to understand what it means and if you touch or interact with it, similar kinds of things happen all the time.

?I think why these guidelines are important is that you are able to deploy once and run at scale,? he said. ?That?s one of the hallmarks of the program ? we don?t get to a trillion served a month unless we are able to do this at scale and work inside existing systems.

The DAA is a consortium of the largest media and marketing associations, including the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers and the Direct Marketing Association.

Minimum dimensions
The ?Ad Marker Implementation Guidelines for Mobile? guidelines provide detailed guidance to advertisers for how the AdChoices icon should be displayed on touch screens. Marketers will find minimum dimensions for the icon on mobile in the guidelines as well as dimensions for the touch area for activating the icon.

Additionally, the guidelines cover what information and options may be displayed once the icon has been touched.

The creative guidelines, which were developed with input from a variety of companies and organizations, will be a welcome addition for some marketers, per Mr. Mastria.

?I was surprised by the number of companies that came to us and said, look, we are running it today but we really want to be able to standardize so that we can deploy once and know that the privacy piece of this campaign is being taking care of,? he said.

Enforcement
The DAA principles establish standards for notice, opt out and limitations on data collection and use.

In the next few months, the DAA plans to release a mobile app that would enable consumers to make choices about ads on their smartphones similar to the Your Ad Choices Web site it currently offers.

Following that, the organization hopes to begin enforcement before the end of 2014.

?This is not likely going be the most sexy thing that we announce this year, but it will probably have one of the deepest impacts on the marketing ecosystem because from now on everybody who does creative, all the people at the front lines of the ecosystem are going to know how to deploy this meaningful notice in a consistent and standardized way and consumers are going to be able to see in a consistent and standardized way,? Mr. Mastria said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York