Facebook & Instagram ads granted accreditation by the Media Rating Council

After more than a year of audits by the Media Rating Council (MRC), Facebook has been granted accreditation for ads on both its platform and Instagram.

According to a release from the MRC, the accreditation applies to ad impressions for Facebook and Instagram’s desktop and mobile websites and mobile apps.

“We recognized the industry’s desire for more independent third-party validation, so this is welcome progress,” says Facebook’s VP of marketing science, Brad Smallwood, “We look forward to continuing our verification work with the MRC.”

The MRC is a US-based nonprofit organization that reviews audience measurement services and manages accreditation for media research and rating purposes. Facebook first opened itself to audits by the MRC in February of 2017 after confirming to advertisers it had made a series of ad metric errors.

Last September, Facebook said that it had an agreed-upon timeline with the MRC to complete a full audit by the independent firm. The two parties met their anticipated March 2018 deadline with today’s announcement.

While Facebook won accreditation, a few ad tech companies lost a portion or all of their accreditations, including AppNexus who withdrew from the process entirely.

Of course, now that Facebook has taken actions to steer clear of its ad measurement woes that started in 2016, the site has now has much bigger and more alarming issues to manage with news that Cambridge Analytica had exploited user data. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying to Congress on April 11 to address the site’s data privacy issues.