First come the ads, and then, as night follows day, must come the metrics. That’s the rationale behind new guidelines for measuring the impact of mobile display ads proposed in early November by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Mobile Marketing Association.
The guidelines are necessary to standardize ad-counting in the rapidly growing area of mobile display advertising. A Forrester Research forecast predicts that U.S. spending on mobile display ads will reach $437 million this year, up from $271 million last year, and will hit $1.26 billion by 2015.
The new guidelines, which will undergo public comment until mid-December and may be adopted by March 2011, attempt to set policies for defining and measuring mobile ad impressions. In the same way, the IAB set the rules for measuring web display ads back in 2005.
That’s something that’s hard to do reliably today, for a number of reasons. For one thing, many mobile browsers can’t accept cookies the way PCs can, making it harder to tell when a user has been exposed to an ad. Mobile network operators also exert dominant control over the release of user data, adding uncertainty to ad measurement.
“Consumers have brought mobile devices into their daily lives at an astonishing pace,” IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg said in a release. “[The proposed mobile guidelines] will give marketers greater assurance that their advertising messages are reaching consumers on these mobile devices, and that’s critical for continued growth.”
Among the practices proposed in the new guidelines are calls for mobile ad servers to submit to impression audits by an independent third party.
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