MRC Finalizes Mobile Viewable Impressions Guidelines

The Media Rating Council (MRC) has issued the final version of its guidelines for measuring viewable impressions in mobile web and mobile in-application environments.

MRC's Mobile Viewable Advertising Impression Measurement Guidelines were developed in collaboration with IAB, MMA, members of the Making Measurement Make Sense initiative and a large working group, and then finalised with input received during a 30-day public comment period. They include parameters for measuring viewable impressions; an industry standard metric designed to represent those mobile ads for which the opportunity-to-see is established. The final guidelines include the minimum thresholds for measuring viewable impressions in mobile web and mobile in-app environments, with a mobile viewable impression requiring a minimum of 50% of pixels in view for one consecutive second for display, and two consecutive seconds for video.

In addition, the guidelines require that a mobile ad must fully download before viewability measurement occurs; and they also include a separate metric for reporting 'sub-second impressions' in mobile newsfeeds, where the mobile ad impressions appear in a newsfeed where 50% or more of the ad's pixels are in continuous view for more than 0.5 seconds, but less than one second (post-download).

George Ivie (pictured), CEO and Executive Director, MRC, comments: 'Mobile viewability is the latest critical step in creating parity between traditional and digital media measurement, laying the foundation for cross-channel, cross-platform measurement. With this step complete, we are now focused on developing audience measurement metrics based on viewable impressions that have been filtered for fraudulent and other invalid traffic, as well as measures of an ad's effectiveness.'

Web site: www.mediaratingcouncil.org .