Here’s a sign that attention measurement is reaching maturity: Certification is coming.
The Media Rating Council (MRC) and the IAB’s Attention Measurement Task Force are launching a joint effort to accredit attention measurement vendors. The IAB announced the initiative in a memo sent to task force members last week that was shared with AdExchanger.
The initiative will kick off this month, and the IAB and MRC expect to have a draft of accreditation guidelines open for public comment by Q1 2025, said Angelina Eng, the IAB’s VP of measurement, addressability and data center.
The IAB hopes to have agreed-upon guidelines for all attention measurement approaches by the end of next year, she added.
What accreditation entails
While this collaboration is a step toward standardization, the aim is not to establish a universal approach to attention measurement, said Ron Pinelli, the MRC’s SVP of digital research and standards.
The IAB and MRC will not set prerequisites for what methodologies or technologies must be included to receive accreditation, Pinelli said. In other words, the MRC will not require that a solution include direct measurements, such as eye-tracking, for example, or proxy measurements, like cursor hover time.
Instead, Pinelli said, the goal of these guidelines will be to establish a framework whereby the MRC can audit individual measurement solutions. It will be the MRC’s job to ensure the technology works as pitched and attention vendors are acquiring user consent as claimed.
If, for example, a measurement vendor says it has a method for evaluating whether someone has stopped scrolling when an ad becomes visible on-screen, that vendor would have to be clear about what signals it’s looking at to make that call, Pinelli said. It would also have to specify to clients that these are proxy measurements that only assess the probability a user is looking at an ad.
Similarly, a vendor specializing in eye-tracking panels would have to disclose how those panels are built, he said.
The same transparency requirements apply if vendors use a mix of direct and proxy measurements.
The accreditation process will also require vendors to disclose whether they’re subject to any privacy laws, how they get user consent for measurement and how obtaining consent impacts measurement. However, Pinelli said, the MRC is not interested in conducting privacy audits, such as assessing whether a solution is compliant with privacy laws like COPPA, CCPA or GDPR.
Partnership perks
The MRC, which offers accreditation for everything from ad verification solutions to TV ratings measurement, has been building toward accreditation for attention vendors for the past two years, Pinelli said.
The MRC has already audited and accredited DoubleVerify’s proxy signal-based approach to measuring attention. It’s also working on an attention-related audit of Integral Ad Science, as well as audits of Adelaide and a few other attention measurement vendors. However, it’s too soon in the audit process for these companies to have been accredited yet, Pinelli said.
While the MRC will still pursue certification of attention vendors on its own, collaborating with the IAB allows the MRC to compile the insights it gathers while auditing individual vendors in one place that’s accessible to all IAB members, Pinelli said.
Working in tandem with the IAB should also make that auditing process a more collaborative effort with wider involvement from a range of ad tech vendors and, crucially, publishers, Pinelli said.
The currency question
The IAB and MRC are seeking involvement from publishers and the wider ad tech ecosystem to avoid potential pitfalls from the rush to prop up attention as an ad-buying currency to replace viewability.
For example, if attention scoring is used for campaign optimization without a nuanced understanding of how attention is measured, Pinelli said, we’ll start to see publishers “doing things that annoy users,” like making ad placements persistent on the page.
In that sense, the MRC is trying to avoid some of the issues that have arisen from viewability becoming a de facto industry currency.
“We have a lot of things we didn’t like about the way the industry reacted to viewability, like optimizing on viewability or treating viewability as an outcome,” Pinelli said. “That’s not what we intended.”
The MRC would have preferred for buyers to have the choice to exclude nonviewable inventory, he added, rather than optimizing ad spend toward high-viewability placements.
Besides, while viewability is a binary metric that assesses whether ad placements are viewable or not, measuring attention is much more nuanced and therefore less suited to becoming a buying standard, Pinelli said.
For that reason, the MRC has actually advised some vendors that it doesn’t believe using attention scoring as a pre-bid targeting parameter is a valid use case, Pinelli said.
“Use attention as a data point, but don’t use it as the end all be all,” he said. “Don’t optimize on it. Don’t use it as an outcome. Don’t use it to evaluate publishers without considering content and contextual relevance.”
Instead, the MRC hopes to educate the industry, with the IAB’s involvement, on the nuances behind attention and how these nuances tie into measuring media quality.
Evaluating the impact that creative has on capturing user attention is one example of an area that requires more understanding, Pinelli said. Also, whether a user’s engagement with content means they pay less attention to the ads, whether a target audience pays more or less attention than other audiences and whether any of these signals can help determine if a campaign actually drove outcomes.
The IAB will prioritize educating its members on these nuances in the coming months, the IAB’s Eng said.
And once the industry has a better grasp of how attention solutions are built, Pinelli added, industry groups will be in a better position to offer guidance on how to apply attention metrics in campaigns.
“That type of guidance is more the job of the industry trade orgs [than the MRC],” he said, “but I can see them doing that on the back of this measurement effort.”
