Ad-ID has been adopted by 300 major advertisers south of the border since launching this spring and is getting a second look in Canada.

‘We’ve reactivated our interest in examining this closer,’ says Bob Reaume, VP of media and research for the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA).

The ACA had discussions with the Institute of Communications and Advertising (ICA) and the Television Bureau of Canada (TVB) about the system earlier in the year but now that Ad-ID looks like it’s being picked up by multinational marketers, Reaume says it will be infiltrating Canadian institutions and systems and needs to come off the backburner.

So far in the U.S., 875 companies have signed up for the ad coding service and more than 14,000 codes have been issued in that country as well as in Canada, the U.K., Australia, France and Portugal.

It has been designed to help marketers track and manage their inventory of advertising messages and make it easier to schedule and verify that print and broadcast ads run as planned. The system assigns a unique 12-character code to each ad execution or individual creative component such as photography and artwork being re-used in separate executions or as ongoing communications components.

Ad-ID (Advertising Digital Identification LLC) is operated by the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies of New York (ad-id.org).

Earlier this summer the ICA launched a test of a voluntary system of standardized coding for broadcast commercials. It has been set up as a precursor to Ad-ID and a system that can also be used into the future by advertisers that choose not join Ad-ID.

The ICA system involves a universal 12-character alphanumeric code to identify each commercial by client, brand, commercial number, year, media choice, length of spot, and language. Letters are used to denote the advertiser, the medium (T for television, R for radio, C for television combo), and language (E for English, F for French). The results of the test will be assessed by the ICA Traffic Committee sometime later this month.