Digital Ad Industry Groups To Online Publishers: Be Ready For “Viewability” Standard By Year-End

The leaders of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative are calling on online publishers to prepare for  “viewability” to become the new currency in display advertising by the end of the year.

In a new post on the  Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) blog, Bob Liodice, CEO and president of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) writes, “The Media Rating Council (MRC) expects to lift its Viewable Impression Advisory by the end of this year, and at that time marketers will eagerly start buying digital media on viewable metrics. Publishers and agencies, we hope you’re ready.”

George Ivie, CEO and executive director of the MRC, and Steve Sullivan, vice president of advertising technology at the IAB, issued a joint piece today titled, Reduce Unmeasurable Inventory Now: Viewable-Impression Standard Coming. Ivie and Sullivan write, ” Reducing the amount of unmeasurable inventory is critical for the industry to successfully transition to the viewable impression as a currency, and it’s essential for publishers and other media sellers to meet marketers’ expectations come Jan. 1.”

Established in 2011, the 3MS initiative is a cross-industry effort to address the impression fraud and marketers’ declining trust of the digital advertising marketplace.  The primary focus of the group is to transition the industry from a served-impression standard to viewable-impression standard. In his post, Liodice says 1.8 trillion display ads were paid for but not actually viewed by users in 2012.

The 3MS leaders are pushing for wide-spread adoption of the IAB SafeFrame, which can capture the IAB’s  in-view percentage metric that counts an ad as viewable when at least 50 percent of the ad appears on screen for at least one second.

Several other vendors have developed and had their own viewability measurement solutions certified by the MRC. Google’s Active View received accreditation back in April. At the end of May, traffic analytics company, spider.io, received MRC accreditation for its viewability solution that can measure viewability within iframes, including nested iFrames. TripAdvisor jumped ahead of the industry and began charging advertisers only for viewable impressions using its own measurement tool back in early April.