From Joe Mandese, Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost: The Media Rating Council (MRC), which has effectively been the standard bearer for the “viewability” of digital ads for the past couple of years, released its first-ever standard for digital audience measurement.
The new standards build on the MRC’s prior work on viewable ad impression measurement, as well as “invalid traffic filtration” requirements, spelling out industry best practices for collecting and processing data used in estimating audience characteristics at the impression level.
Importantly, the standards introduce the concept of “duration weighting” viewability of digital ads — laying the groundwork for the MRC’s broader effort to develop a cross-media measurement standard, which is also under development.
The MRC emphasized that while it remains committed to incorporating weighting into its planned 2018 cross-media measurement standards, it stated that “additional research will be conducted over the next year. That may lead to refinements of the requirements around duration weighting for digital ads and those of other media types, which ultimately will be reflected in those forthcoming standards.”
Mandese, J. (2017, Dec. 7). MRC Releases Digital Audience Standard, Incorporates ‘Duration Weighting’. MediaPost.