• by Joe Mandese , 2 hours ago

The Media Rating Council (MRC) this morning issued a final version of its so-called "Digital Advertising Auction Transparency" standards, effectively ratifying a draft it released in September 2025.

The initiative, spearheaded by Omnicom and supported by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, the IAB Tech Lab and the World Federation of Advertisers, was conceived to provide ad industry visibility into the largely "black box" nature of programmatic ad auction mechanics and enables advertisers, agencies and publishers to better understand the pricing and allocation of programmatic ad inventory and its bidding dynamics.

“Digital advertising runs on auctions, but buyers still can’t typically see the rules of the game,” OMD Chief Media Officer Ben Hovaness said in a statement, adding that the new standards, "“create a baseline for disclosure and reporting-how an auction scores, sets prices, uses reserves, and changes over time-so advertisers can validate outcomes, improve their bid strategies, and reduce waste that never reaches working media."

The final version, which can be viewed here, sets ad industry standards for disclosing and reporting key elements of ad auctions of display, text, video, audio, search, social, retail, media streaming, CTV, and addressable TV advertising inventory, but may ultimately be extended to other formats.

The disclosure requirements include:

• Type(s) of auction system(s) used.

• How winners of auctions are determined.

• After the winners of an auction have been determined, how prices that winners must pay are set.

• Use of reserve prices and methods to update them over time.

• Use of advance information about bids and budgets to adjust the functioning of the auction process and how this is updated over time.

• How often rules of the auction system are updated and disclosed to users?

• What information is disclosed or reported about the auction system and the outcome of auction?

The initiative has not been without controversy as a number of industry stakeholders criticized elements of the proposed standards, including formal comments filed by the Check My Ads Institute objecting to elements of the proposed draft, and the omission of at least one big ad tech platform -- Google's -- participation.

Effective with today's release, the MRC said its new finalized standards will be adopted by digital auctioneers and applied as part of the council's voluntary accreditation audits.