MRC Releases Its Final Guidelines on Mobile Ad Viewability

The Media Rating Council (MRC) released its final guidelines on mobile ad viewability standards today, and the results haven't changed much since the preliminary guidelines went out on April 1st: The MRC considers a mobile video ad viewable if 50 percent of its pixels are in view for two consecutive seconds. This is the same standard put forward for desktop video ads.

As the MRC is quick to point out, the viewability standard doesn't reflect whether or not an ad was seen, but that it has the potential to be seen.

Because mobile ads can take longer to load than desktop ads, the MRC's guidelines specify that ads must fully render before measurement can begin.

Establishing viewability as a guideline, says George Ivie, CEO of the MRC, is an evolution over the previous served impression standard, where ads were counted if they appeared anywhere on a page, even if they had no chance of being seen.

"Because non-viewable inventory is eliminated, using viewable impressions makes downstream metrics such as audience, engagement, ad effectiveness, and ROI calculations more focused on ads that at least could be viewed," Ivie says. "Viewable impressions, including desktop and now mobile, are the foundational steps to setting audience-based currency standards and cross-media audience currency standards, which are MRC's next immediate priorities."

As OnlineVideo.net has documented, years of attention to ad viewability have not resulted in a rise in viewable ads. Viewability rates are under 50 percent for desktop and around 40 percent for mobile.

One ad expert Gaila Reichenstein, COO of mobile ad tech company Taptica, sees the standards as a sign of the industry's maturity, but cautions against using desktop standard for mobile.

"Advertisers should not view mobile as an extension of their desktop campaigns. Instead, considering the transparency and data points that mobile offers, these advertisers should be focusing much more on performance metrics to vet quality," Reichenstein says. "Brands can take the risk out of buying unseen ads by using the right trackers to follow users through the entire journey, focusing on retention, and paying on measurable metrics."

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net