iAd Becomes First Mobile Ad Network To Earn Media Ratings Council Accreditation

The Media Ratings Council gave iAd, Apple’s mobile ad platform for iPhone and iPad, full accreditation earlier this month. The accreditation marks a first for a major mobile ad platform.

The display ad industry has been beset by pressure from media buyers and advertisers to serve ads that are actually viewable by users. Some 31percent of display ads are never seen by users according to a comScore study.

Mobile advertisers face the added issue of paying for ads that don’t display properly on any given mobile device. As John McDermott reports in AdAge, the iAd accreditation may help push other mobile networks to follow and add legitimacy to the mobile ad industry as a whole.

Accreditation is based on iAd’s capacity to meet the standards that Interactive Advertising Bureau and Mobile Marketing Association laid out earlier this year. It shows that iAd sufficiently demonstrated that ads served on the iAd platform will display properly and that performance measurements such as impressions, taps, conversions and other key metrics are accurately reported.

Apple said its mobile ad network is more streamlined than others and that it only charges for ads that fully render on users’ screens.

Google’s DoubleClick is among the other companies going through the accreditation process, which involves a thorough audit and costs more than $100,000. Google announced last month that it would start using viewability as the standard metric on both DoubleClick and the Google Display Network after the company received MRC accreditation for its viewability measurement solution, Active View.

According to eMarketer, mobile advertising is expected to hit $27.13 billion in total ad revenue by 2017, accounting for just under 45 percent of all digital ad revenue. Apple’s iAd holds roughly 6% of the total revenue share. Apple is certainly hoping the accreditation helps increase that share by instilling confidence in brands to spend more.

Last year, Apple reduced the minimum ad spend from $500,000 to $100,000 and raised the revenue split for developers to 70 percent.