The Media Rating Council (MRC) has released a final version of the advertising and media industry’s new standards for cross-media audience measurement, including a significant
revision to a controversial component that would require audience measurement companies to weight the duration of ad impressions calculated across video ad platforms.
The MRC said it
is moving to a weighting process that uses a “relative” denominator based on the actual length of the specific ad being measured vs. its previous recommendation of a “fixed”
denominator based on an industry standard 30-second ad impression.
The MRC said it is making the adjustment following a series of discussions with industry stakeholders, especially
from the demand-side, who believe the relative approach is a more fair and accurate way of accounting for the audience delivered by each ad unit.
The duration weights, which will not
become required until January 2021, effectively create a common denominator for evaluating the audience delivered across video platforms, including conventional linear TV, over-the-top and digital
video.
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In all cases, the duration weights credit only the portion of the ads that were actually exposed to users with 100% of their pixels and with audio present for video ads with
an audio component.
All other aspects of the originally proposed standards -- including that measurement estimates must first filter for sophisticated invalid audience traffic --
remain the same.
