MRC Expects to Lift Advisory against Transacting on Viewable Impressions by Year End 2013
NEW YORK, NY (June 12, 2013) — As part of its work to advance the viewable impression as a digital advertising currency metric, MRC has been engaged in pilot testing and standards development work for more than a year. Information gained from these activities led us to issue an Industry Communication titled “Viewable Impression Advisory” last November to provide the industry with a status report on the state of viewable impression measurement, and to call out the key obstacles that MRC believed stood in the way of moving to viewable impressions as a currency metric on a widespread basis. This communication provides an update on the status of these matters, and on the estimated timeline for when MRC believes they will no longer be gating issues standing in the way of the marketplace transacting on viewability on a widespread basis. In summary:
- MRC believes it is still premature at this time to transact on viewability, although much progress has been made on the issues that led us to issue our original Advisory in November 2012.
- An increasing number of viewability vendors have been accredited by MRC, and still more are in process, which is serving to validate their processes and improve disclosure of their varying capabilities.
- Cross domain iFrames continue to present varying degrees of challenge for most viewability measurers. IAB’s SafeFrame specification, which was released in March 2013, is expected to help significantly in this regard.
- More is known today about those impediments to viewability measurement apart from cross domain iFrames, and this knowledge is informing the development of viewability measurement standards.
- MRC will administer a reconciliation project later this year that will seek to account for the causes of discrepancies in viewable impression counts among accredited vendors.
- MRC expects to be in a position to lift the Viewable Impression Advisory by year end 2013.
Further details on each of the above are provided in the full advisory report.
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Viewable impressions are a foundational element of Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS), an industry-wide initiative of the ANA, 4A’s and IAB, currently managed by MRC, to standardize digital media metrics and define advertising “currency” that will strengthen the evaluation of digital media and promote cross-platform comparison for brand marketing.
