Media Rating Council (MRC) CEO, George Ivie, has heard your complaints about viewability, and he thinks you’re missing the point. It’s taken longer to nail down “viewability” than the MRC wanted, Ivie says, but the whole digital ad viewability idea was only meant to be a relatively quick fix on route to a bigger thing, which is now set to arrive by 2019. That would be cross-platform media measurement standards across all forms of TV and digital video delivery around demographics or any other audience data that marketers want.
The digital video piece of that standard came out in December, and many marketers are already trading on it using tools from Nielsen and comScore, Ivie notes. The broader cross-platform guidelines that should emerge in draft form by late this year could include something else many advertisers long have clamored for: more precise ratings of TV commercials.
The MRC wanted the viewability standard out there to eliminate the “low-hanging fruit” of non-viewable impressions, which were rampant at the time. “What we didn’t do is go beyond that very quickly,” he says. “The viewable impression was never meant to establish the value of the advertising. It was meant to establish ‘Did it have an opportunity to be seen?'”
Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) CEO Greg Stuart says his group’s advertiser-supervised research shows no correlation between how long ads are viewed and how effective they are. Ivie says he welcomes research from the MMA or anyone else in shaping the new rules.
“If we only push duration weighting into the digital side, and we don’t have commercial measurement and duration weighting in television, this won’t be a fair implementation and, frankly, we don’t do it,” Ivie says. TV’s version may turn out to be ratings for individual minutes within a pod rather than individual commercials, he says, but it won’t just be a broad average of viewership across all ads in a show, as exists now in standard commercial ratings.
Neff, J. (2018, May 2). Down with Viewability: MRC Chief Says It’s Time to Move Past ‘Marketplace Fixation’. AdAge.