The Media Rating Council on Wednesday released finalized standards for outcome measurement and data quality.
The finalized standards (PDF) mean the advertising industry now has requirements that outcome-based measurement can be evaluated against, according to Judy Davey, VP of Media Policy and Marketing Capabilities at the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA). The ACA, along with the U.S.-based Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and 4As, endorsed the standards.
Results are the effort of a working group representing over 100 organizations across the media and advertising industries. Standards cover outcomes, measures and approaches, including for attribution and Multi-Touch Attribution, Market Mix Modeling, and experiments, along with the underlying data quality related to those methods.
“These standards represent the realization of a new and critical phase of a long-term effort by MRC, in cooperation with other industry trade associations, to enhance advertising measurement,” said MRC Executive Director and CEO George W. Ivie in a statement. “This initiative began more than a decade ago with projects designed to standardize measures of ad delivery, and has now progressed to the measurement of business outcomes that are associated with ad exposure.”
In the announcement, Bill Tucker, EVP of ANA Group, highlighted the importance of clear industry standards as it relates to effective ad spending, while also noting the latest standards were developed in coordination with marketers to ensure they represent and address the group’s needs.
“With marketers increasingly looking to outcomes as the primary determinant of ad spend effectiveness, it is critical that the industry has a clear set of standards against which providers of attribution measurement can be assessed,” Tucker stated.
Ashwini Karandikar, EVO of Media, Tech and Data for the 4As, noted that commercial performance and outcome-based compensation models are becoming more common, and said standards provide a roadmap for the requirements of data collection for advertisers and marketers.
“This framework is an important baseline because it enables independent, validated data to be more consistently measured and connected to outcomes,” Karandikar commented.
Davey also encouraged “all providers of attribution to seek accreditation against the MRC Standards, as this will be a key factor in helping to advance the use of outcome based measurement and enable innovation.”
Outcome-based measurement has been on the radar of measurement and ratings companies including traditional provider Nielsen. The company had its MRC accreditation suspended in 2021 for potentially unreliable data, and aims to regain its status later this year.
In June Nielsen announced it would add advanced audiences and outcomes measurement to Nielsen One’s alpha version. Those features are meant to help marketers gain insight into a campaign’s reach and frequency, as well as its overall effectiveness.
NBCUniversal over the summer announced a certification for emotion and ad quality as a new category within its audience measurement framework as part of a push to help marketers better understand how the emotion element and creative impacts ad outcomes.
As for the finalized MCR standards, here are key provisions as outlined in the announcement:
- Outcomes analyzed, associated or attributed to media and advertising activities should be relevant, logical and aligned with user goals, while supported by consistent definitions and approaches
- Intent must be directly observable or inferred based on behavior using empirically supported approaches
- Interactions with ads and content must be clearly defined and empirically supported
- A base of viewable impressions is required as an option for attribution of Outcomes; SIVT filtration is also required
- The source and nature of datasets must be generally disclosed to users along with details of collection parameters, editing and cleaning applied as well as known biases or limitations associated to it
- Care must be taken to properly disclose the methodology for measuring and reporting ROI and ROAS and inferences associated with them
- These Standards encourage Cross-Media coverage for measurement of ad and media exposure, but do not require all measures of Outcomes to include Cross-Media measurement
- Viewability should not be used to imply presence of a user or that an ad has been viewed/seen
- Outcomes measurement providers should consider Advertising Exposure or contact by the consumer as well as their Attention or impact for any audience if causality is to be assessed
- Single-touch attribution use cases are generally limited to a specific campaign objective/product type
- The process and support for determining which exposures are attributed and the weights or values assigned to them must be robust and demonstrable for audit purposes of MTA methodologies
- The results of RCT exercises and non-experimental methodologies must be treated as estimates and must adhere to statistical and sample-based requirements of the MRC Minimum Standards