Facebook Viewability Standards; Pinterest Talks Paid Media

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Facebook, Viewability Sheriff

Facebook is teaming up with the Media Rating Council, Nielsen, the IAB and a handful of brands and agencies to develop mobile and in-feed viewability standards, Ad Age reports. The coalition aims to have a working set of standards penned by the fourth quarter of 2015. “Our view, at least for right now, is to make sure the ad comes into view. Then once it’s in view, do you have a minimum requirement in time or size?” explained Facebook’s VP for measurement and insights, Brad Smallwood. But that’s where Facebook differs with the MRC, who last year defined viewability as 50% in-view for at least two seconds. Will the industry bend to Facebook’s in-view will? Related: Smallwood talks with AdExchanger about Facebook’s viewability policy.

Pinterest At CODE/Media

Speaking at the CODE/Media conference on Wednesday, Pinterest partnerships head Joanne Bradford talked up the company’s unique paid media proposition. “What we’ve found with the Pinterest launch of ads is that people actually like ads and save them,” she said. “And advertisers got 30 percent free media with their campaigns just on an earned basis, from passing it around, it’d be like I gave you a page of a magazine and you gave it to more people.” Pinterest’s platform hosts more than 30 billion pins on more than 750 million boards, and two-thirds of that content belongs to businesses. Read on at CNBC.

Medium Chief: MAU Must Go

Blogger and Twitter/Medium co-founder Ev Williams thinks Internet companies and investors have a metrics problem. “I think a lot of the Internet and tech coverage of the Internet focuses on a distorting number of metrics … primarily users or monthly active users,” Williams said at the CODE/Media conference. “We don’t want to trick ourselves into optimizing for the wrong thing. … A better measure is the time people spend on these story pages.” TechCrunch has more. This metrics debate comes as Williams bullishly positions Medium at a “Platisher.” Read Kara Swisher grill him about that via Re/code.

Brands Budgets

Data from a Duke University survey of 288 chief marketing execs suggests that mobile advertising now takes up 3.2% of brands’ overall marketing budgets, and that figure will nearly triple in the next three years to 9%. According to the findings, digital marketing spend will jump 14.7% in the next year, while traditional ad budgets will dip by 1.1%. Overall marketing budgets will grow 8.7% in 2015, the largest YoY forecast since 2012. “Compare that to the [.5] percent growth that they expected in February ’09, and their confidence in markets is very clear,” said Christine Moorman, research director and professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Read on at AdWeek.

Rovi’s TV Platform

A&E is first in line to trial a new TV targeting platform from Rovi. Ad Optimizer, as it’s called, is not an addressable ad system, though it does pull data from a number of sources to target audiences based on a programmer’s ad inventory. “We really tried to coexist with the TV ecosystem rather than try to change the TV ecosystem … and leverage additional data sets to understand the true target audience for an advertiser,” said John Hoctor, Rovi GM for analytics. “There’s a lot of pressure from advertisers and their agencies to understand with more granularity what the audience characteristics are of the placements that are being made.” Though the platform’s not programmatic, advertisers can plug their own automated solutions into Ad Optimizer, Hoctor added. Multichannel has more.