3MS, MRC Develop Cross-Media Measurement Standards

As the culmination of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, the 4A’s—in cooperation with the Media Rating Council (MRC), Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)—this month introduced the release of Cross-Media Measurement Standards for combining measurement across channels. This allows for unified reporting on video advertising across online and offline channels alike, including linear and time-shifted TV, VOD, OTT, and streaming video (both desktop and mobile).

Cross-Media Measurement Standards is an industry-leading effort to create coherent and holistic measurement guidelines that focus on impression-level reporting (not GRPs) on video advertising (with additional media to follow). Further, these standards are designed to expand additional metrics that have been part of the 3MS journey:

• Invalid Traffic: Filtration has been expanded to include both General and Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (GIVT and SIVT)—including fraudulent, non-human, and bot traffic—yielding more stringent requirements for compliance.
• Viewability: Standards have been raised from 50% of pixels to 100% appearing within the viewable window for a sustained time period (no less than two continuous seconds).
• Duration Weighting: Designed to measure the time during which viewability conditions persist, duration weighting is expected to follow in early 2021 and to measure the portion or percentage of a unit that is heard or viewed (subject to marketplace determination) relative to the length of the advertisement overall.

We hope these standards will support the industry’s ongoing efforts to achieve a more holistic and comprehensive set of measurement tools and improved reporting capabilities.

Find an overview of 3MS here and the MRC’s Cross-Media Audience Measurement Standards Public Comments Draft here.