The Media Rating Council (MRC), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), today announced their collaboration on the issuance of new, more
detailed guidelines for interactive advertising campaign measurement. The new guidelines are a follow-up to initial parameters established in January 2002 by the IAB, the MRC, and the Advertising
Research Foundation with support from the AAAA and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
The new set of guidelines will establish a consistent definition of how to count an ad impression.
Currently an impression is defined as "the measurement of responses from a Web server to a page request from the user browser, which is filtered from robotic activity and error codes, and is recorded
at a point as close as possible to opportunity to see the page by the user." Additionally, the group will develop an auditing and a certification process that will enable advertisers and their
agencies to have confidence in the impression counts across multiple ad-serving technologies.
The IAB, the MRC and the AAAA are endeavoring to improve the existing guidelines and during the process
intend to provide periodic status updates to the industry. The process will include the development of consistent industry definitions, an MRC regulated audit process, and actual compliance to these
definitions by many of today's publishers and third-party ad servers. Until the new guidelines are unveiled, current guidelines remain in effect. Todd Teresi, Yahoo!, serves as chair of the IAB
Measurement Committee and Jonathan Adams, mOne, Worldwide, chairs the AAAA Eastern Interactive Marketing and New Media Committee.